| | |  | Manager's Guides to Computing | Home » » » Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition | | | | | | | 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 applications are highly interactive? Rails has it built in. Want an application that sends and receives e-mail? Built in. Supports internationalization and localization? Built in. Do you need applications with a REST-based interface (so they can interact with other RESTful applications with almost no effort on your part)? All built-in. With this book, you'll learn how to use ActiveRecord to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. Need to create and modify your schema? Migrations make it painless (and they're versioned, so you can roll changes backward and forward). You'll learn how to use the Action Pack framework to route incoming requests and render pages using easy-to-write templates and components. See how to exploit the Rails service frameworks to send emails, implement web services, and create dynamic, user-centric web-pages using built-in Javascript and Ajax support. There is extensive coverage of testing, and the rewritten Deployment chapter now covers Phusion Passenger. As with the previous editions of the book, we start with an extended tutorial that builds parts of an online store. And, of course, the application has been rewritten to show the best of Rails V2.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Sam Ruby | | Paperback:
| 850 pages | | Publisher:
| Pragmatic Bookshelf | | Publication Date:
| April 04, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1934356166 | | Product Length:
| 8.88 inches | | Product Width:
| 7.5 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.33 inches | | Product Weight:
| 2.23 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.98 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.48 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 2.34 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 29 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 29 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 23 found the following review helpful:
 Awesome explanations, gotchasMay 31, 2009
By Edward Park
Summary: Great book after you've learned the basics of RoR.
I'm writing this review because I disagree strongly with some of the previously submitted reviews that rated this book poorly.
This IS the book I'd HIGHLY recommend to anyone with a programming background who has gone through intro-level RoR books and online tutorials and wants to delve deeper into understanding the framework, in terms of gotchas, tips, recommended coding practices, etc.
When I go to a book store and pick up a book, I skim through it, look at the content, and see if the author(s) covered important or complex topics with an appropriate level of detail. This book nailed that part. Even in skimming the book for 5 minutes, I found explanations for several issues I had run into while learning RoR. E.g. with a has-one / belong-to relationship between 2 models, when does the relationship get saved if you associate the parent in the child, or associate the child to the parent? Things like that, which are relevant to programmers build real applications, are invaluable to know.
One thing that makes the book excellent is how well it explains options and their tradeoffs for implementation of functionality. E.g. there is an excellent writeup on the options for managing session data.
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
Still a "Must Have" For Those New to RailsJun 08, 2009
By Larry
I don't remember earlier versions of this book getting slammed quite like this one. Maybe it's simply because there's more competition around. Regardless, I still think this is "the" Rails book to get if you're just starting out, or want a refresher on some of the main areas of Rails.
It's gotta be hard to put out a book against such a fast-moving target, and to their credit I think they did a pretty good job - for example, they were able to sneak in a description about named scopes.
My main gripe is that REST has been adopted by the Rails community for quite some time, and I think the tutorial should have been rewritten to reflect this, i.e. it could have done wihout the "add_to_cart", "who_bought", etc. actions in the controllers.
16 of 19 found the following review helpful:
Good, but not idealMay 16, 2009
By effnish
I've made it through most of this book and while it has some good coding examples it lacks thorough explanations. If you've got a solid background in development and have done a little research on Rails you'll pick up the content without too much suffering. I've been developing Java for 3 years with little to no web experience and I feel like I could struggle through my own project at this point, but there are better books out there.
I would suggest starting with Rails Foundations 2 and moving to this book later. The Foundations author does a superb job of explaining the rails framework, ActiveRecord, views, and controllers in the 1st 7 chapters before jumping into building an application. Overall that book and Simply Rails 2 strike a better balance between application development and instruction.
11 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 a lot of fragments of do this and do thatApr 21, 2009
By Epsilon Delta
the feel i get from the pragmatic guide on Rails is: do this and do that. It gives you a lot of fragments of knowledge, without a very complete big picture, and without a complete explanation of what's going on. I tend to learn from the big picture and then going down to the details, and understand why in each step, so this book is not for me.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Gets Better Every Time I Refer to It.Dec 23, 2009
By Rilindo Foster
Originally, I meant to use this book to learn Rails. For some reason though, I could not quite get through the material - I think that the example application (the famous depot code ) was not something I particular care for at the time, so I ended up using the Learning Rails book from O'Reilly to start learning how to build Rails apps. Then I went and did something for a while.
When I got back into Rails, I again went to the Learning Rails book and started to build a web app, however, I felt like I should be able to do more with the app I built, so I started to search around various Rails web sites, as well as the Rails API documentation; at some point, I started to refer to the Agile book again. That is when I started to understand why its so popular.
Details on Active Record / Views? Check.
Pagination? Check.
Time Zones? Check.
In fact, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time on research if I have just look up the details I wanted to know in the book. That, I believe, is the strength of this book - not only it will give you the basics of building Rails, but it will go into depth as to WHY and HOW Rails works.
Not to say that Learning Rails book is bad - I think I did better with the Learning Rails through that book and I recommend that publication to anyone getting into Rails. At the same time, if you want to get beyond the basics, you will save yourself a lot of time on research by just going through the Agile book. If nothing else, get both books.
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