Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications

I could not get on with this book at all. I found it jumped about missing explanations and left me totally confused from the outset. i had to get guidance from the Sitepoint forums (which is really useful) but the book just omitted steps and took for granted that you would know what you were doing. So i gave up with this book based on the fact that i didn't think it had been planned and edited properly. They should get a novice to work through these books before releasing them.

It came as no surprise to me that this book was recently made available free to download. I wonder why?

A good introduction (1/1 people found this helpful)

Having got hold of a free e-book version while it was available, I used it as the basis for getting into Rails. Coming from a mixed development background, but with essentially no knowledge of Ruby, I didn't have any real problem following the explanations.
It tries to avoid assuming background knowledge. It's look a bit alien if you don't understand HTML, perhaps, but as an example, where it uses CSS it gives you the CSS snippet you need to add in, and you can see the results when you refresh the page, and points you to look elsewhere for full CSS information - it doesn't make a big thing of it, so if you don't understand that you could gloss over it and look fully at CSS later.
The example is done in an agile approach, where one part is implemented, unit tests written, etc, database migration code written, etc, so that at each stage you have something that works, and which has followed some sound development principles to help make sure future changes don't break things.
All in all, if it doesn't get you immediately interested in actually trying to do things in Rails, then you're not a developer... for reference, I found that the free RadRails IDE was handy when following the examples (rather than the ones recommended by the book, it's more powerful and helps you to keep track of the many files in your project better), and that on Windows the InstantRails download got things up and running in record time.
The focus of the book is really more on Rails than on Ruby, so if you want a full overview of developing in Ruby as well as just rails, then you may need to look elsewhere, but it certainly gives you enough to get some basic database applications up, looking nice, with AJAX-based performance enhancements.

A great introduction to ruby on rails (4/4 people found this helpful)

This is a really great book that got me started on using Ruby on Rails to produce web applications easily. It starts right at the beginning, showing you how to install Ruby and Rails and has instructions for Windows, Mac and Linux. It also has a brilliant introduction to the Ruby language with one of the best descriptions of Object Orientated Programming (OOP) I have seen. The book then moves on to build a complete web application - a Digg clone (imaginatively called Shovell!)

After just one chapter of working with Rails you have a working application that admittedly doesn't do much, but this is built upon in each successive chapter. One of the really good points about this book is the author encourages you to use the console - which allows you to interact with your application without the web front-end and helps you to understand what is actually happening in the background. There is also a big emphasis on testing, which is built in with Rails. The end of each chapter includes all the test functions required to give automatic testing. This is a great habit to encourage beginners to get into.

The book follows a tutorial format and it is bang up to date (for Rails 1.2) with chapters covering migrations, plugins and Ajax using RJS templates. All the code is really well explained, although my only criticism is that you are only told what you need for the actual Shovell application - nothing is ever covered in depth. This is sometimes more apparent with some aspects than others. For example, I finished this book and knew migrations really well, but while it introduced me to RJS templates, I didn't really know anything about them. But this is unfair as this is only an introductory book for Rails. What it does do is pique your interest enough to go online looking for more info (it would also be useful to buy a more advanced book such as Agile Development with Rails). My only other negative is that the application did not follow a RESTful design which is currently very in-vogue with Rails developers. I would like to see this incorporated into a second edition as it took me a long time trawling the Internet to find out about REST and I think I could have picked it up a lot easier with this authors easy to understand style.

Overall I would highly recommend this book to anybody who is interested in using Ruby on Rails to develop their own web applications. It will get you off to a great start using correct and up to date practices.

Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications

Patrick Lenz

Reader Reviews:

Not for the beginner and inconsistent. (0/0 people found this helpful)

A good introduction (1/1 people found this helpful)

A great introduction to ruby on rails (4/4 people found this helpful)

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