Short Opinion: Ruby For Rails book review

This book is aimed towards the neophyte Ruby On Rails developer. The majority of books out there either are focused towards Ruby as a language or assume that the reader is familiar (if not downright proficient) with the language and proceed to explain the framework. As you can tell, there is a lot of middle ground between these two categories and this book comes to fill the void. The first couple of chapters are a short introduction to Ruby as a language and Ruby On Rails as a framework. The “meat” starts from chapter three and afterwards. The writing style is excellent, not dry but does not makes quick jabs at humour. The author really seems to understand his material and (at least for myself), there is an abundance of “I should have guessed that/This is an excellent new idea!” moments that tend to shed some light into the more quirky aspects of RoR. The sequencing of material is great, it follows a quite logical progression and before you know it you will be dealing with the more esoteric features of both the language and the framework. Having said all these great things, the main criticism is this: in order to make full use of the book you need some external reference material. My suggestions are “Agile Web Programming with Rails” as an external Rails reference and “Programming Ruby” (AKA “the pickaxe book”) as a Ruby reference. But as my second RoR book, it really shines and I cannot but highly recommend it to persons in a similar situation with me. A more formal review will follow when I will have reread the book.

Book Review - Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy

Since this is the first Ruby On Rails book I have read in its entirety (for reasons too lame to explain here), I decided to write a short review. The book is a really light one and is aimed towards the person that has no Ruby on Rails experience whatsoever (it is stated in the very first paragraph).

After the usual prologue stuff, we get some installation instruction for MacOS X and Win32 but NO LINUX?!? Getting rails on a linux box borders on trivial but still some installation instructions would be much appreciate, at least for the sake of completeness. The main pedagogical model of the book is learn through developing (an approach that worked superbly in the “Heads First” series of books) so throughout the book you will be developing a web application for a classified ad system. The application itself is not that bad but the first criticism arises when trying to punch in the code. Lots of typos! A user review in amazon.com also states that the code in the book’s homepage has the same errors. As a somewhat experienced programmer with an internet connection I was able to figure and solve them put perhaps this is not a task for everyone and what was the editor doing?

Ruby on Rails has gone a few revisions. This one is aimed for the v1.0 crowd so if you run some of the code with the -w switch or if you bother to check the API documentation you can see that some of the stuff included in the book is deprecated or on its way out. Still, the code (assuming the above typos are fixed) still works.
Which brings us to the second criticism of the book. There is little explanation. I am all for learn by example but not even basic syntax is discussed. The author gives the general idea of what is about to do and why but does not provide alternatives. So it is up to the reader to work out the details for himself.

Some of the good points of the book is that it gives a brief treatment of AJAX (still sorely lacking in details so you have to figure out on your own how to extend the examples) and how it is integrated within Rails (once again not something mind blowing but you do get to see it in action) and a novel idea: Microformats! While I have read about them in a issue of Linux Format, it was nice to see them referenced and applied in a real project.

Having reached the application in a pretty usable state (the cop-out line “this goes beyond the scope of this book” can be seen quite a few times but this is understandable due to the nature of the book), the authors take a U-turn and presents us with scaffolding. I really am in favor of this argument that scaffolding should be introduced after one is familiar with the basics but at least he could give us a bit more analytical overview of scaffolding and contrast the two approaches.

The book closes with a treatise of Testing. Testing is very important and one of the fundamentals of Rails is to facilitate testing. This is not accentuated nowhere in the book and the whole appendix looks like “we put it there because it had to be there”.

Overall, this book is a fire and forget effort.If you had no exposure with Ruby On Rails you can pick up the pace by reading it once. The language of the author is quite clear and for the most part, the visual design of the book helps (although a bit MacOS X oriented). But do not expect to be rereading this. I have not read O’Reilly’s offering towards the newbie RoR crowd so I cannot contrast the two but this one will be gathering dust. Perhaps a more appropriate title could be “Ruby On Rails - a use once and forget” book.