S. Taylor said
I'm working through this book as I work to transition from PHP development to Rails with Ajax. I'm starting a new project from scratch and wanted to take on this "newish" methodology that is supposed to make my development more fun and way faster.
Well I bought the book a year ago when I was thinking the same thing. But I didn't find the time to invest in a new language until now.
Unfortunately Rails 2.0 has been out for a while and this book is written to 1.2 or something. Prototype is also in version 2.x and the book was written to something like 1.5
And that doesn't even mention that there are much different ways to get Ruby and Rails installed now.
So far I've spent a few days just making Rails work at all on my XP computer. It turns out that there is now a package called InstantRails that you just unzip and run in place. So I wasted those days trying to track down the components described in this book to no avail.
Now that I'm working with the code, I'm finding that the examples simply don't work in about half the cases due to the deprecated functions and new naming conventions and so on. It's like learning how it was done two years ago along with how it is done now. And it's really slowing me down.
Every time something doesn't work, instead of learning the lesson intended by the book, I spend a lot more time learning how to troubleshoot the problem until I find the new correct way of doing the same thing.
So I can't say that I'm not learning from this book. I'm learning a lot. It just that I'm learning by correcting errors on my own instead of by clear examples that work. It's kind of painful and slow.
The book seems to be good other than that. My only complaint is that some of the terms used aren't clearly explained early on. But I think most programmers can get past those and just keep reading and be fine.
I just don't recommend buying this book anymore. If there's an updated version to cover the current versions of the applications, that might be worth getting.
Loc Nguyen said
I bought this book thinking I would learn a lot. I've done very little JavaScript and Ajax before so I was expecting to soak this up like a sponge. I did the examples and read through the book and felt like I got a great introduction to using Ajax with Rails. That's the problem though, I feel like the book needs more meat, especially in the RJS section. Now that I have a good foundation, I'm looking elsewhere for more intermediate concepts that should've been part of this text.
Manuel Chamber González said
It's a good book, the structure and ideas are clear and comprehensive maybe I miss to download the examples' code from internet but I quite a few happy with this purchase, I got my money's worth.
Mustang said
I've bought this book with expectation. The title implied the feeling that this book would be THE book I'd ever need for AJAX on Rails. However it gave less than I've expected. There's a large portion of reference material you can easily find in the rails documentation. It was an easy read, I've completed in one day. In the end, I found Peepcode videos to be more informative than this book.
Mehdi Y. said
The chapters are short and cover what is needed to start programming in any of the subjects they cover such as: prototype, rjs. Examples are also well chosen.
This book assumes good level of familiarity with javascript and ruby on rails.
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