The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) | Obie Fernandez

The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) | Obie Fernandez | A must-have reference for any Rails developer

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The Rails Way (Add...

	The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) Obie Fernandez Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007 - 912 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

must-have reference for rails devs.

I've been waiting for this book since the Sample chapter on activeRecord was released. I suspected this book would answer all the people decrying Rails lack of (java or PHP-like) docs. Well, it is breathtaking in its scope (really), it is the definitive working dev's reference to the APIs, development, testing and deployment best practices and most widely adopted/tested plugins and gems (with a few holes). I believe every dev should go thru the table of contents slowly and carefully (several times).

Obie F seems to have assembled a huge team of resources to collaborate on each chapter, and it shows in exhaustive coverage. The table of contents entry for the testing chapter is 2 1/2 pages long and rspec is separate from that. So when i hit a problem, i think i'll hit this book first, then google rails mailing lists, and the intarweb tubes.

Negatives (cause I'm looking for perfection):
- footnotes are clustered at each chapter's end. Good luck finding a superscript number in a 75-page chapter.

-typesetting needs work. It doesn't clearly convey a hierarchy of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics , there's just lot of serif, non-serif, bold, italics and sizes on pages that walk through APIs (ajax, ActiveSupport chapters). Better to use outline-style numbering (e.g. Pragmatics). p. 229: the code example mixes an opening single-quote and backticks. Bad, bad.

- a number of what could be considered core topics are not covered: search/indexing libraries (ferret, solr, sphinx), HAML/SASS, pinging and site stats libs like mint, god, AWStats, etc. Postgres (this is a biggie), they recommend deploying to Mysql and Redhat/Centos/Debian /gentoo without much detail. textmate/vim/emacs/eclipse. source control libs like darcs and git. Rspec *is* given 30 pages, this is big. (There's not room for detailed discussion, but they could have mentioned these things ina sentence somewhere. most of these topics are covered in detail somewhere in blogspace, except for ferret/solr/sphinx deployment strategies, where you have to read mailing list archives.

- rails is on cusp of widespread adoption of release 2. I haven't seen anywhere that AW or Safari online books plans to issue regular PDF or online updates to the book. This is the main criticism if it is correct, relative to how Pragmatic has been releasing its books.

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A must-have reference for any Rails developer

This is an outstanding book. It's not a good introduction to Rails, which it isn't intended to be, but for someone who knows the basics of Rails this book is both an essential reference and a valuable tutorial on the deeper aspects of Rails. Despite the fact that it is, at its heart, a reference, there's so much insight in the descriptions that it's a great tutorial as well for the intermediate Rails developer.

Must-read

Rails had a must-read, now it has two.

The Rails Way is an outstanding book. Obie has done an extraordinary work, giving perspective and context to each corner of the framework with a wonderful style where a programmer talks to another programmer from solid experience. After you read this book you'll have a much deeper understanding of Rails and Rails programming.

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Keep this one close...

Having received my copy only days ago I'm blazing through it because I can't put it down. This is going to be a valuable resource for me - I love the conversational style mixed with no-nonsense tips from Obie.

Obie takes you through the internals of Rails, pointing out the interesting bits you took for granted when you started out. He backs up his observations with real-world experience. I especially love Courtenay's quips.

I'm glad I have this book in my library.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6

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