Olexiy Prokhorenko said
This book is very good, but I strongly SUGGEST and cannot hardly STRESS ENOUGH for every newbie with Ruby on Rails -- LEARN RUBY FIRST.
I am telling you, this will benefit thousand times later when you start developing.
At the moment I am writing this review this 2nd edition of the books is outdated, as we have even Rails 3 coming soon. ;-)
David O'brien said
This book was written over two years ago for version 1.2. The current version of Rails is 2.2. There are many things in this book that simply won't work. I got up to page 67 to find out that the $40 I paid for this book was a waste of money. Amazon should stop selling this book. If you want to learn Rails, don't buy a book, because they will be obsolete. Look for online tutorials instead.
abarak said
A concise and accurate tutorial and reference to the Ruby on Rails framework.
Starting with the simple (and not very useful in real life..) "shopping cart" project the book demonstrates RoR web application fundamentals step by step. Shopping cart is a good, quick way to get acquainted with Rails if you are a newbie as I am.
When done building and playing with shopping cart you'll want to start designing your own ideas. Agile's following chapters include reference material which lets easily getting deeper understanding of how the framework is built and how it works. You'll find plenty of information of how to customize whatever you need to customize, as well as explanations of low level functions and APIs which are not used in the tutorial but may very well be used in more advanced applications.
Used to pretty good PHP online documentation available online I was hoping to learn RoR the same way, but RoR is different, and as far as I can tell there's simply no good tutorials available online. If you're in for learning RoR, buy the book, you won't regret.
I would recommend getting the 3rd edition (no hard copies yet) which covers RoR version 2.2.
(BTW - I've done most of the learning on my personal WinXP machine, and some on http://www.heroku.com, where you can write and run RoR apps online)
Will said
You can buy this second edition half price ($19.95) from publisher at
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails2/agile-web-development-with-rails
You can also get the third edition in PDF with hard copy to follow for 53.95 at
http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-with-rails-third-edition
The publisher says that the release date for the third edition is March 15, 2009.
Brett L. Schuchert said
OK, I'm coming to rails late. I've played with Ruby on and off for about a year. I though it was a bit of a "kitchen sink" language until I got a good kick in the head by Neil Ford.
So this week I picked up this book (version 2) and I started reading it. It is, as far as technical books go, a page turner.
It gives a basic overview and the walks through an example as a tutorial.
I recommend you learn a little Ruby first (not necessary but makes working through the examples more focused on Rails rather than Ruby and Rails).
If you want to learn about Ruby on Rails and get an idea of what web development should be, read this book. THEN, the next time you need to start working on a site for a customer, sit down with them and start developing the site in real-time.
If they don't like Ruby, call it an "executable requirements description". Eventually, they might even think that the solution is good as is. If not, you still have a better explanation of where to go.
After Rails, I'm going back to RSpec and story tests and examine the maturity of developing a Ruby solution using TDD. I'm pretty sure it's already being done, so I just need to get on that learning curve.
This is a GREAT book. Get it, read it, TYPE in the examples - ok maybe download the CSS's and the style-sheet.
WARNING: the material related to OS X installation is a bit out of date. Use macports and install mysql, rb-mysql, rails, ruby (and I'm probably forgetting something), change your path to point to where that stuff got installed (probably /opt/local/bin/) and you'll be good to go - once you get mysql setup. There are some chicken scratchings here: http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/Ruby.RailsConfiguration.OSX, or do a google search. It'll be October 2008 before I actually put up good details, but it'll happen.
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