Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
You want to write professional-grade applications: Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework, with integrated support for unit, functional, and integration testing. It enforces good design principles, consistency of code across your team (and across your organization), and proper release management. But Rails is more than a set of best practices. Rails makes it both fun and easy to turn out very cool web applications. Need Ajax support, so your web applications are highly interactive? Ra
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(out of 26 reviews)
List Price: $ 43.95
Price: $ 29.01
Review by M. MCKNIGHT for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
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This is the first book you should follow if you plan to get into Rails development. I know many people who have tried to learn Rails. Many that were successful began by running through the tutorial in this book, many that we’re unsuccessful or didn’t get it, didn’t follow this book. Don’t just read it, do the work, run the code and build the sample application.
Then, as you are building your own application, the additional depth provided by the reference chapters at the back are excellent. They are the must/read reference section of the book. Combining this with The Pickaxe and you are on your way to becoming a good Rails developer. At which point, please contact me so that I can offer you a job.
The only downside to owning this book is that Rails moves quickly, and covering 2.2 leaves out many 2.3 features. As a mitigation, Sam Ruby has a test suite for the code in the book that ensures it all runs with the latest version of rails, or at least the failures are noted and demarcated. One should consider purchasing the digital version of this book from [...] where you can get the PDF bundled or separately, as it is updated from time to time.
Review by Rilindo Foster for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
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Originally, I meant to use this book to learn Rails. For some reason though, I could not quite get through the material – I think that the example application (the famous depot code ) was not something I particular care for at the time, so I ended up using the Learning Rails book from O’Reilly to start learning how to build Rails apps. Then I went and did something for a while.
When I got back into Rails, I again went to the Learning Rails book and started to build a web app, however, I felt like I should be able to do more with the app I built, so I started to search around various Rails web sites, as well as the Rails API documentation; at some point, I started to refer to the Agile book again. That is when I started to understand why its so popular.
Details on Active Record / Views? Check.
Pagination? Check.
Time Zones? Check.
In fact, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time on research if I have just look up the details I wanted to know in the book. That, I believe, is the strength of this book – not only it will give you the basics of building Rails, but it will go into depth as to WHY and HOW Rails works.
Not to say that Learning Rails book is bad – I think I did better with the Learning Rails through that book and I recommend that publication to anyone getting into Rails. At the same time, if you want to get beyond the basics, you will save yourself a lot of time on research by just going through the Agile book. If nothing else, get both books.
Review by effnish for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
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I’ve made it through most of this book and while it has some good coding examples it lacks thorough explanations. If you’ve got a solid background in development and have done a little research on Rails you’ll pick up the content without too much suffering. I’ve been developing Java for 3 years with little to no web experience and I feel like I could struggle through my own project at this point, but there are better books out there.
I would suggest starting with Rails Foundations 2 and moving to this book later. The Foundations author does a superb job of explaining the rails framework, ActiveRecord, views, and controllers in the 1st 7 chapters before jumping into building an application. Overall that book and Simply Rails 2 strike a better balance between application development and instruction.
Review by Larry for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
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I don’t remember earlier versions of this book getting slammed quite like this one. Maybe it’s simply because there’s more competition around. Regardless, I still think this is “the” Rails book to get if you’re just starting out, or want a refresher on some of the main areas of Rails.
It’s gotta be hard to put out a book against such a fast-moving target, and to their credit I think they did a pretty good job – for example, they were able to sneak in a description about named scopes.
My main gripe is that REST has been adopted by the Rails community for quite some time, and I think the tutorial should have been rewritten to reflect this, i.e. it could have done wihout the “add_to_cart”, “who_bought”, etc. actions in the controllers.
Review by Edward Park for Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
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Summary: Great book after you’ve learned the basics of RoR.
I’m writing this review because I disagree strongly with some of the previously submitted reviews that rated this book poorly.
This IS the book I’d HIGHLY recommend to anyone with a programming background who has gone through intro-level RoR books and online tutorials and wants to delve deeper into understanding the framework, in terms of gotchas, tips, recommended coding practices, etc.
When I go to a book store and pick up a book, I skim through it, look at the content, and see if the author(s) covered important or complex topics with an appropriate level of detail. This book nailed that part. Even in skimming the book for 5 minutes, I found explanations for several issues I had run into while learning RoR. E.g. with a has-one / belong-to relationship between 2 models, when does the relationship get saved if you associate the parent in the child, or associate the child to the parent? Things like that, which are relevant to programmers build real applications, are invaluable to know.
One thing that makes the book excellent is how well it explains options and their tradeoffs for implementation of functionality. E.g. there is an excellent writeup on the options for managing session data.