Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
On April - 6 - 20105 COMMENTS
- ISBN13: 9781934356166
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
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 applicati… More >>
I’ve found “Simply Rails 2″ to be a much better book. You can find the first few chapters online.
This book teaches you by means of building an application. It tells you how to build it and VERY briefly explains what you’re doing. You spend more time building the application than understanding concepts. I can’t learn that way.
ALSO it NEVER explained how to use your computers commands (for OSX, the Terminal app). Didn’t explain any of it. It took me about 15 hours to get through the first phases of the app, which the author keeps ranting how easy it was and how it only took him 15 minutes..
Rating: 1 / 5
I bought this book because it’s the textbook for my Ruby on Rails class. It is absolutely the worst book I have ever had to use! Rails is heavily dependent on convention, and this book doesn’t discuss those conventions in any sensible manner, it only hints at them in a particular usage which is often misleading. What could they have been thinking? Bottom line, these guys don’t have the first idea of how to teach and their conviction of their own superiority bleeds through their prose, which very off putting. If you already know BOTH ruby and rails, this may be a good reference. If you’re looking to learn, pick another book.
Rating: 1 / 5
This easy-to-read tome is everything, and more, I expected. No technical jargon to wade through; just simple, understandable guidance for learning how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails. I highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in learning this fun and amazing development platform!
Rating: 5 / 5
I can’t really figure out whether Dave Thomas is responsible for fostering more bad habits that result in horrible monkey-see-monkey-do software than Aaron Hillegass or not, but with this third edition, I can figure out that the whole cowboy hat headshot thing needs to stop immediately. It’s really just pathetic.
This book is a good place to start if you want to learn how to implement a really basic shopping cart system that probably won’t work in Rails (it doesn’t work because the authors “wanted to illustrate the problems” -pg 114). If you want to do anything else, including use a current version of the framework, buy “The Rails Way” and “Enterprise Rails” instead, and keep to the online documentation. The whole “agile” notion is great and all, but the way Thomas plays it up as an excuse to avoid any notion of thoughtful design is a very sad cop-out from a very sad man who hasn’t really written too many useful Rails applications that I’ve seen. Those who can’t do, get publishing deals.
Rating: 2 / 5
There’s not really too much to say other than this is the book to buy. Lots of great examples, written in an accessible format, and no steep learning curves like you see in a lot of programming books.
Plus, this is the book endorsed by the people behind Rails.
Rating: 4 / 5