Mark Obrien said
The Rails community is flourishing, and the technology is evolving quickly. Before too long, Rails 2.3 will be in general release. This book is a solid reference, but its roots are in Rails 1.x, with a couple of scraps tossed in to earn the "Rails 2.0" seal on the cover. As a rails newbie, I got a foundation from this book, but unfortunately, if you try and take this book literally but you are working in rails 2.x, you will get frustrated. There are plenty of resources on the web to help fill this gap. I like having a physical reference, so I'm glad I bought the book, but newbies beware. I would love to see a new edition of this book, thoroughly updated to reflect the current state of rails.
Loc Nguyen said
This is my most frequently referenced book. Whenever I find myself unsure of how to do something I depend on The Rails Way to remind me. I've been programming with RoR since v1.2 though, so I know how to navigate the material. I noticed the poor reviews here cite it as a bad way to learn RoR from scratch. Well, I agree but in no way does that make it deserving of 1 or 2 stars.
Obie's chapter on ReST is the best and most concise explanation I've read so far. I wasn't able to completely understand ReST until I sat down and focused on that one chapter. Just that section alone made this book worth it for me.
SoftwareRancher said
From the blurb it might appear that this book is a good way to get into Rails: it is not! When you read the intro in the book itself the author states that the intent of this book is to serve as a reference book for folks who already know Rails; curiously that fact didn't make it into the information used to aid purchasers. Maybe I'll find this book useful if and when I learn Rails; however, the first chapter did not seem very well written, so I don't have high hopes for the rest of the book.
J. P. McGaw said
I'm fairly new to Rails, and for the past few months I've been working through a lot of "Intro to Rails" books, and others where you build a big project over the course of the book. The materials are all excellent, but they did leave me with a lack of understanding. Often, with Rails, I would do something, like create two models, create associations, etc., and it works for me...but I really didn't have any idea how it was working.
That's where this book helps tremendously. There are not large examples for development, but it tells you what Rails is doing under the hood, how it's doing it, and why. It's a wonderful book for those looking for a deeper understanding.
Of course, it's definitely not for complete beginners. You should already know how to do at least the basics with Rails (particularly the console), and it would help to have a base understanding of Ruby.
Clinton Begin said
This is a good book that could have been better with a better publisher. I'm very disappointed with Addison Wesley here.
First, the production quality of this book is horrid. If I had picked it up physically in a book store, I would have never bought it. The paper is thick and heavy, yet cheap, like elementary school construction paper. I have books of equal page numbers that are a centimeter thinner. I literally took a razor blade to mine and split it in two so I could carry it around to read it (that's how committed I was to reading it, which says something for the content :-). For anyone interested, splitting it exactly at Chapter 12 works without it falling apart.
The editing was horrid too. Somewhere between the copy editor and the technical reviewers, someone should have caught the repetition. As an author myself, I know how hard it is to review your own work, especially when it comes to wordiness and repetition. So I don't blame the author, but the editing/reviewing process. The editors/reviewers should have also caught some of the continuity problems, starting with the very first chapter. When I started reading the book I had about a year of Rails experience and had read about 3 other Rails books. While I read the first chapter, I was thinking: "Wow... how lost are Rails noobs right now?"
Next, there are 30 pages of fluff at the beginning of the book. Again, not likely a decision of the author, but filler inserted by publishers. By comparison, The Ruby Programming Language (O'Reilly) has 5 pages before the first chapter. There is also over 100 pages of API reference, which were outdated the second the book hit the shelves. Again, I cannot imagine Obie actually suggesting this, and I know how pushy publishers are. Note to Addison Wesley: There's this really neat thing called the internet where we go for up-to-date API references now!
Finally, this is not a Rails 2.0 book. This is where I truly sympathize with any author of a technical book. Writing books takes a damn long time and is very hard. It's often the case that the technology changes by the time the book is finished. But that does not mean that a publisher should LIE on the front cover on the book. Of course, Rails 2.0 is mentioned in the book. But so many things from the migrations to the ActiveRecord discussion were not even Rails 1.2! Some of the soft information and suggestions were still worthwhile, but it still isn't Rails 2.0. So to put a big "Covers Rails 2.0" stamp on the front is borderline dishonest... at most, it "mentions 2.0 sometimes".
This is still a good book and a worthwhile read. Under almost any other publisher it is a 5 star book. The star lost is at the hands of Addison Wesley (I wanted to take two, but Obie doesn't deserve that). I hope a second edition comes out that covers all of these production quality issues, thus putting a better frame around a worthwhile piece of work.
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