Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional

by Hampton Catlin, Jeffrey Allan Hardy, Cloves Carneiro Jr, et al.

Book Overview

Ruby on Rails has taken the world by storm. First released in the mid-2004, this open source framework has single-handedly changed the landscape of Web development. It's both powering and defining the "Web 2.0" revolution on the web, providing a radical shift in the way we think about web applications.

Beginning Ruby on Rails is for anybody who wishes to join the revolution. You'll learn how all of the components of the Rails framework...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590596862
• ISBN13: 9781590596869
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 361 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great Rails Book For All Developers

'Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional' is a great book for all developers of all levels to learn Rails and get going in no time! With 350+ pages of material covering a whole myriad of different topics from different operating systems to using MySQL to using AJAX to make your web 2.0 app work seamlessly with maximum user friendliness, this is the perfect book for doing just that!! If you want to get up and running with Rails and need a book to do just that, pick up this great effort from Apress and you will be on the crazy train (horrible attempt at a Rails joke) to building web apps that will be fast and fantastic!! ***** RECOMMENDED

Very clear introduction to Rails

Highly recommended. The heart of the book, discussions in Chapters 4-6, on Active Record, Action View and controllers, are structured and clear. The authors have carefully prioritized the info that a beginning rails developer would need to know thoroughly, and presented it in short, to-the-point paragraphs, along with graphics (screen shots, mini-UML's for the active Record chapters, etc.) that reinforce the points well. Tables that give most common options for the feature being discussed are helpful, also. I believe that the most difficult thing for a newbie is following the flow of logic in a MVC framework, from the web form that creates/finds a model object's params, to processing params in the controller and Active Record, including validations, showing errors and letting users correct them, CRUD processes in the DBMS and all the routing, renders and redirects that show users what's happening. The authors take each subtopic of Active Record, views and controllers, give an short, intuitive summary of why it's important, then give the most common use scenarios, along with common traps or misunderstandings that might arise. Chapter 7, Ajax, tackles a large subject in a very condensed manner(they say as much on p. 228). While the overview is good, it's more like a 30,000 foot view that doesn't quite give you enough confidence to start coding in Prototype and scriptaculous. For that, there's the excellent "Ajax on Rails" Raymond book, as well as a couple others in the pipeline. The rest of the covers testing, sending emails and deployment in, again, a condensed manner. Rails is a fast-moving target, there's a lot of topics that could have been covered here: rspec, test/spec, mocks and stubs, plugins to make fixtures usable, or avoid using fixtures, etc. But it's a great smallish intro to Rails. The appendix intro to Ruby is superfluous. If you already know python, perl or PHP, it might be all you need to get started coding ruby. Otherwise, you'll probably need a more complete intro and reference (Black's "ruby for Rails" is highly recommended). So this is a topic-structured tutorial for Rails, in contrast to Apress' social networking and e-commerce books, which are project-based and present more code with less explanation (and covered more plugins like Ferret, acts_as_taggable, etc) If you ahve the luxury of borrowing a few different intro rails books , i would encourage it. One or the other method of presenting Rails may work better for you. But you can't go wrong with this book. The typesetting is clear: code is readable, Tips and Notes are clearly demarcated. The one thing is tat some of the blurbs printed on gray backgrounds are a bit difficult to read

Best Rails starter book

I was never satisfied with "Agile Web Development with Rails", which was the first Rails book and will forever sell a lot of copies because it was written by DHH. However, its not particularly well organized or well written. The flow of "Beginning Rails" is much better. Every paragraph is more succinct. I consider myself a Rails expert, so much of the content I was already familiar with, but I nonetheless learned a few things (such as how to receive mail in Rails, not just send). Its useful. I run a Rails development team and will furnish all our new engineers with a copy, unless they are already up to speed on the platform. (In which case something like "Programming Ruby" would be best.)

Good Introduction to Rails

I'm a web designer, mostly doing XHTML and CSS. Often I need to work with dynamic applications, so I'm familiar with things like ASP and PHP. I wanted a book to bring me up to speed on Rails since some of the work I've been getting lately has been Rails applications. This book is good for someone like me who has knowledge of web app design, but an absolute beginner might be stumped by a few bugs. But, if you already have some knowledge in server-side development, this would be a good book to pick up.

Great for getting started!

Not being a trained developer I am surely not the only one that got a little intimidated by Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) This is a great book for beginners like me. You'll get a complete introduction to the Rails framework. If you already develop in Rails, look elsewhere but if you have heard the hype and want to see what all the fuss is about, take the plunge, this book will get you up to speed in no time.