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Review
This encyclopedic book is not only a definitive Rails reference, but an indispensable guide to Software-as-a-Service coding techniques for serious craftspersons. I keep a copy in the lab, a copy at home, and a copy on each of my three e-book readers, and it’s on the short list of essential resources for my undergraduate software engineering course.
—Armando Fox, adjunct associate professor, University of California, Berkeley
Everyone interested in Rails, at some point, has to follow The Rails Way.
—Fabio Cevasco, senior technical writer, Siemens AG, and blogger at H3RALD.com
I can positively say that it’s the single best Rails book ever published to date. By a long shot.
—Antonio Cangiano, software engineer and technical evangelist at IBM
This book is a great crash course in Ruby on Rails! It doesn’t just document the features of Rails, it filters everything through the lens of an experienced Rails developer—so you come our a pro on the other side.
—Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace, and Rails developer since 2005
The key to The Rails Way is in the title. It literally covers the “way” to do almost everything with Rails. Writing a truly exhaustive reference to the most popular Web application framework used by thousands of developers is no mean feat. A thankful community of developers that has struggled to rely on scant documentation will embrace The Rails Way with open arms. A tour de force!
—Peter Cooper, editor, Ruby Inside
In the past year, dozens of Rails books have been rushed to publication. A handful are good. Most regurgitate rudimentary information easily found on the Web. Only this book provides both the broad and deep technicalities of Rails. Nascent and expert developers, I recommend you follow The Rails Way.
—Martin Streicher, chief technology officer, McLatchy Interactive; former editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine
Hal Fulton’s The RubyWay has always been by my side as a reference while programming Ruby. Many times I had wished there was a book that had the same depth and attention to detail, only focused on the Rails framework. That book is now here and hasn’t left my desk for the past month.
—Nate Klaiber, Ruby programmer
As noted in my contribution to the Afterword: “What Is the Rails Way (To You)?,” I knew soon after becoming involved with Rails that I had found something great. Now, with Obie’s book, I have been able to step into Ruby on Rails development coming from .NET and be productive right away. The applications I have created I believe to be a much better quality due to the techniques I learned using Obie’s knowledge.
—Robert Bazinet, InfoQ.com, .NET and Ruby community editor, and founding member of the Hartford, CT, Ruby Brigade
Extremely well written; it’s a resource that every Rails programmer should have. Yes, it’s that good.
—Reuven Lerner, Linux Journal columnist
Product Description
—Yehuda Katz, Rails Core
The Bible for Ruby on Rails Application Development
Ruby on Rails strips complexity from the development process, enabling professional developers to focus on what matters most: delivering business value via clean and maintainable code. The Rails™ 3 Way is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 3. Pioneering Rails expert Obie Fernandez and a team of leading experts illuminate the entire Rails 3 API, along with the idioms, design approaches, and libraries that make developing applications with Rails so powerful. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience and track record, they address the real challenges development teams face, showing how to use Rails 3 to maximize your productivity.
Using numerous detailed code examples, the author systematically covers Rails 3 key capabilities and subsystems, making this book a reference that you will turn to again and again. He presents advanced Rails programming techniques that have been proven effective in day-to-day usage on dozens of production Rails systems and offers important insights into behavior-driven development and production considerations such as scalability. Dive deep into the Rails 3 codebase and discover why Rails is designed the way it is—and how to make it do what you want it to do.
This book will help you
- Learn what’s new in Rails 3
- Increase your productivity as a web application developer
- Realize the overall joy in programming with Rails
- Leverage Rails’ powerful capabilities for building REST-compliant APIs
- Drive implementation and protect long-term maintainability using RSpec
- Design and manipulate your domain layer using Active Record
- Understand and program complex program flows using Action Controller
- Master sophisticated URL routing concepts
- Use Ajax techniques via Rails 3 support for unobtrusive JavaScript
- Learn to extend Rails with popular gems and plugins, and how to write your own
- Extend Rails with the best third-party plug-ins and write your own
- Integrate email services into your applications with Action Mailer
- Improve application responsiveness with background processing
- Create your own non-Active Record domain classes using Active Model
- Master Rails’ utility classes and extensions in Active Support
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I have also ordered a 'companion' which is the Ruby Tutorial - which seems to have been delayed in release (with DVD) - and have in my impatience purchased the package direct from the authors web site - in pdf and ipod/QTime format.
I cannot express how highly I regard this book alongside the others in the same series.
I would add more specifics but am working my way through book - and will update review with specifics again. Great Coverage!
It's not an introductory book in any sense and Obie acknowledges this in his introduction. Obie bills it as a "day-to-day reference for the full-time Rails developer" - a fair description IMHO, but the book feels disjointed in places and has a scattershot approach to what it cares to cover. You need to be clued up to digest this book properly. For an intermediate to expert Rails developer (especially one yet to move to Rails 3) or an expert Rubyist new to Rails, The Rails 3 Way is a useful book that unearths some of the trickier parts of Rails 3 a professional needs to know about. I recommend it - but not as wholeheartedly as the original edition for a number of reasons:
* Parts of the book feel curiously short or scattershot in their coverage. The AJAX on Rails chapter is a mere 16 pages. The RSpec chapter is 33 pages long and provides only an overview (and says as much) though given the recent release of RSpec 2.0 and the new RSpec book, this may be a plus. Rails Engines aren't discussed or covered at all except for a small sidenote that links you to a gist on GitHub. It's not all bad though - some chapters are great, complete guides to a topic, such as Active Record Associations and Advanced Active Record.
* A lot can be gathered from what's not mentioned in the book at all: Capybara, Selenium, Webrat, Searchlogic, SASS, factory_girl.. It wouldn't be expected for a book like The Rails 3 Way to go into depth with any of these tools but having no mentions of them when related issues are raised feels like a missed opportunity to give people some guidance. The lack of Webrat is bizarre since the only full integration test shown in the book clearly uses it. Webrat is neither mentioned nor explained. Nor is Capybara, Webrat's heir apparent.
* The concept of using a different ORM than ActiveRecord is mentioned only once, in the context of running --skip-migration on a rails generate in order to prevent ActiveRecord migrations being generated. Considering what a big deal ORM agnosticism was when developing Rails 3, this is a disappointment.
* Concepts are sometimes used in code but not mentioned in the text. In the RSpec chapter, for instance, the first example includes a call to factory_girl's Factory method, yet nothing about factory_girl or the benefits of factories is covered. I only know it's factory_girl being called because the gem's name appears in the copy-and-pasted output from running bundle install 500 pages earlier.
* Tests are rarely used or demonstrated except in the RSpec overview, Working With Active Record (4 test snippets in 39 pages), Action Mailer (once), and Active Record Associations (6 test snippets in 50 pages). Oddly, though, 4 stray instances of using Test::Unit instead pop up when writing a test for a belongs_to association - it's never used again anywhere else in the main part of the book..
Nonetheless, I recommend the book. It's a flawed champ. While there are other great Rails books in the pipeline, The Rails 3 Way offers a lot right now, as long as you're either happy to look past its flaws or skilled enough to mentally fill in the blanks..
Listings and tables are converted to images, and some of those are so small that it is all but impossible to read on the Kindle.
Unfortunately, the Kindle for PC version is even worse, the image rendering is pathetic, to say the least.
I've bought 3 other Kindle books from the Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series as well, only Eloquent Ruby and Rails AntiPatterns can be read in their entirety on the Kindle, Service-Orientated Design with Ruby and Rails is as badly delivered as The Rails 3 Way.
At least one can get some of the missing details by looking at the source code repositories for each book, but that is no excuse. If you buy a book (paper copy), surely the expectation is that all pages can be read?
Before picking this up, you're probably going to want to have hit your head against something in the framework, or have tried to solve something that the framework doesn't necessarily lend itself well to, or just plain gotten stuck on something. In short, I think that you need a fair amount of context before this book is useful in any way. Not enough, and your eyes will glaze over, too much and it will seem to be restating the obvious without giving you any finer points to chew on.
This book's best audience is probably the intermediate Rails developer who has written some rails applications, has a basic understanding of the RoR framework, but still thinks that much of what happens is "magic".
If this is you, this book has much to offer. It covers all the major pieces of developing with Rails 3 from configuration to AREL to caching to writing your own plugins (and more).
For such a developer, The Rails 3 Way is likely to take you from being a haphazard poke-a-stick-at-it programmer to a deliberate, skillful, productive, and confident RoR developer.
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