Agile Web Development with Rails Pragmatic Programmers: Amazon.co.uk: Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, Leon Breedt, Mike Clark, James Duncan Davidson, Justin Gehtland, Andreas Schwarz: Books

Product Description

The definitive, Jolt-award winning guide to learning and using Rails is now in its Second Edition. Rails is a new approach to web-based application development that enables developers to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications using less code and less effort. Now programmers can get the job done right and still leave work on time.

NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION: The book has been updated to take advantage of all the new Rails 1.2 features. The sample application uses migrations, Ajax, features a REST interface, and illustrates new Rails features. There are new chapters on migrations, active support, active record, and action controller (including the new resources-based routing). The Web 2.0 and Deployment chapters have been completely rewritten to reflect the latest thinking. Now you can learn which environments are best for your style application, and see how Capistrano makes managing your site simple. All the remaining chapters have been extensively updated. Finally, hundreds of comments from readers of the first edition have been incorporated, making this book simply the best available.

Rails is a full-stack, open source web framework that enables you to create full-featured, sophisticated web-based applications with a twist...you can create a full Rails application using less code than the setup XML you'd need just to configure some other frameworks.

With this book, you'll learn how to use Rails Active Record to connect business objects and database tables. No more painful object-relational mapping. Just create your business objects and let Rails do the rest. 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, talk to web services, and interact dynamically with JavaScript applications running in the browser (the "Ajax" architecture).

You'll see how easy it is to deploy Rails. You'll be writing applications that work with your favorite database (MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and more) in no time at all.

About the Author

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt have more than 50 years combined experience, developing software for clients around the world. For the last 10 years they've been working together as The Pragmatic Programmers, helping clients write software and improve their development processes. They are authors of the best-selling The Pragmatic Programmer, and have written several other books. They speak at conferences globally, and are editors of IEEE Software's "Construction" column. Mike Clark is a consultant, author, speaker, and programmer. He is the author of Pragmatic Project Automation (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2004), editor of PragmaticAutomation.com, a frequent speaker at software development conferences, and the creator of several popular open source tools. Mike helps teams build better software faster through his company, Clarkware Consulting. James Duncan Davidson is a photographer, author, and software developer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of O'Reilly's Running Mac OS X Tiger and a contributor to Mac OS X Hacks, among others. He is perhaps best known for his work on Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant, both open source software projects created during his tenure at Sun Microsystems. More recently, he's been working on lots of Ruby on Rails based websites and Objective-C based Cocoa applications. Since 2005, he has been the photographer for all the conferences produced by O'Reilly Media. Working as a professional programmer, instructor, speaker and pundit since 1992, Justin Gehtland has developed real-world applications using VB, COM, .NET, Java, Perl and a slew of obscure technologies since relegated to the trash heap of technical history. His focus has historically been on "connected" applications, which of course has led him down the COM+, ASP/ASP.NET and JSP roads.Justin is the co-author of Effective Visual Basic (Addison Wesley, 2001) and Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Addison Wesley, 2003). He is currently the regular Agility columnist on The Server Side .NET, and works as a consultant through his company Relevance, LLC in addition to teaching for DevelopMentor.

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

The only place to start with RubyOnRails 4 Jan 2007

By GS Colborne

Format:Paperback

This book is co-authored by the creator of Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson, with the Dave Thomas, the author of 'Programming Ruby' (otherwise known as The PickAxe book).

You simply cannot go wrong with this one, it is written assuming you know nothing about Rails or Ruby and gives a fantastic introduction to them both, but especially to Rails.

Starting out with 'Hello World' and then building a useful web application called 'Depot', an online store, explaining at a good level what is going on in the framework at all times it then finishes off with some more advanced chapters on Active Record (the model), Deployment and Scaling etc...

What I like about Ruby on Rails, that this book communicated so well to me, coming from a mainly Perl (with a little Java experience) background, is the great advantages of Model View Controller architecture, Object Relational Mapping, Test Driven Development and other topics without ever talking down or over-complicating as so many techie books seem to do.

Other good chapters include: 'Web 2.0 (with AJAX)', 'Web Services with Rails', 'Securing your Application' and an 'Introduction to Ruby' which is based on The PickAxe tutorial.

To learn more about Ruby, once you have completed this book, (and you will complete it as Rails is such a great technology you will simply want to know more about Ruby to get deeper into Rails!) you should get Dave Thomas's 'Programming Ruby'.

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

Brilliant pace for quick results 3 Feb 2007

By Mr. M. Wilson

I am working through the examples in the book and find the pace is spot-on. When I start learning a new language, library or framework, I like to see quick results and then delve deeper to learn the details. That's how Rails works and it's how this book works. I am learning Rails very quickly and am continually amazed at the power of this remarkable framework. For anyone who wants to learn Rails, I can highly recommend this book. It isn't essential to know much Ruby before starting this book, but if you are new to the language, then Dave Thomas' "Programming Ruby" is an excellent companion.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

From Novice to Professional 1 Jun 2007

By C. A. Sinclair

Well what can I say? There are a number of books out there that boldly proclaim that they can assist readers in the transition from novice to the nirvana of professional programming. Whilst many do fulfil their promise, I'm certain that very few of them make the transition as enjoyable an experience as Dave does in this exceptional offering.

Being versed in a number of languages/frameworks, I'm used to sitting at a desk with a mammoth of a book and working my way through it. However, I have to honestly say that the way in which this book is written makes it both simple and enjoyable for those new to concepts such as OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and the MVC way of life(Model, View, Controller), let alone Rails (By the way, that'll all make sense once you've worked through the book).

Not being one to make empty statements, I borrowed the book to a friend that is a designer, with no real interest in programming (might I add), to give it a test drive. Long story short, he's kept the book and I've just ordered another. Knowing that I was going to write a review he asked me to quote him, so here goes... "By the time I finish this book, and have messed around with a project or two, I'll have to change my business cards to designer/developer!" I think you get the picture.

To wrap it up, I love this book. For those that are new to any form of programming, please don't be intimidated. Dave has made Rails as easy to learn as it is powerful, which is great for those wanting to 'cut their teeth' on Rails. However, this book is written for both the complete novice and programming guru, explaining things in enough detail to enlighten entry level programmers, but not quite enough to bore the more advanced.

In a word Dave, Kudos!