Chris McAvoy said
I'm a software developer who uses Rails frequently to complete projects, so I'm not _exactly_ the target audience for this book, however, I recently had to work with on a Rails project with a handful of .NET developers. This book helped me better understand where they were coming from, and helped us all communicate more effectively.
The Rails app that we collaborated on ultimately ran on Linux, but was backed by SQL Server. The process of learning one another's platforms would have been significantly more difficult without this book guiding the .NET devs and myself on each other's platforms. Great book!
Techie Evan said
Rails is so different from classic ASP.Net in many ways that I was skeptical this book would be worth buying, much less recommending to newbies, instead of, say, a straight Ruby on Rails (RoR) only introductory book. Now that I've finished reading it, I can say that this book explains Rails concepts better than some straight RoR only introductory books. Additionally, if you're trying to figure out how easy it would be for your Windows-only shop to integrate and deploy Rails applications into your environments, you'll be glad to know the authors have included code samples demonstrating how .Net can consume Rails services and vice-versa, and reference materials on efforts by Microsoft and others to make Windows a friendlier platform for Ruby and Rails than it has been so far. As LINQ, IronRuby, ASP.Net MVC, ADO.Net Entity Framework, and REST Support in Windows Communication Foundation become more widely adopted within the .Net community, and as work of some within the Ruby/Rails community to offer something similar to LINQ progresses, I hope there would be a follow-on edition or book to report on next steps in the evolution of these two sets of technologies. Kudos!
Michael Leung said
When I jumped the proverbial .NET ship to the wonderful world of open source development with Ruby on Rails, there wasn't a resource even half as beneficial as this excellent book.
Jeff and Brian do a great job of explaining the most essential topics required to create real world Rails applications, and they do it with you, the .NET developer in mind. They cover the whole gamut of Rails development, and as such you'll be up and running with Rails in no time. I think the most valuable part of this book is the "here's how you'd do it in .NET, and here's how you do it in Rails" side of things. Really helps to solidify the concepts.
Rails for .NET Developers is chock full of great, usable code examples that should greatly expand your Rails toolkit in no time flat. This is a must have book if you're interested in learning the excellent Ruby on Rails framework, and the Ruby language itself. Order it now.
Matthew Baker said
The title says it all. If you've spent a large chunk of your development career building Web Applications over .NET on Windows and wish to jump into Ruby on Rails development, this is definitely the book for you.
While hardly a reference for ActiveRecord, ActionController or ActionView(and it's not intended to be), you will get a solid introduction to the basics of Ruby and to the basics of how the three aforementioned modules work together to make development on RoR as pleasant as possible. This book does a great job in comparing and contrasting the underlying framework of ASP.NET to the MVC+REST world of Rails.
If you're a .NET developer looking to learn Ruby mostly for the Web world, this book is a great place to start.
Taylor Smith said
I've spent the last 4 years developing web applications in the Microsoft .Net framework. After hearing about rails for the past year or so I've tried getting up and going on my own but Rails is such a different beast than .Net I've always gotten frustrated. Being a .Net developer, I'm working on a Windows machine and I've very familiar with how .Net applications are developed and deployed, not so much with the *nix systems and deployment prevalent in the Rails community.
Enter Jeff and Brian's book.
I loved the way they contrasted Rails and .Net with code from each showing a single topic. It really helped me walk through what was happening in a language I was familiar with and still get the ideas behind the Rails conventions. Also their focus on a windows development environment helped tremendously in the initial install process.
I can see now that the hardest part of all is going to be learning Ruby and they did a great job giving an intro to the language and syntax to someone not familiar with dynamically typed languages.
I've already recommended this book to co-workers and for my boss to buy a copy for the office. Its definitely a resource I plan on referring to during my upcoming development projects.
Comments