RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional...

RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) | Michael Hartl, Aurelius Prochazka | Great Intro to Ruby on Rails

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RailsSpace: Buildi...

	RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) Michael Hartl, Aurelius Prochazka Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007 - 537 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Ruby on Rails is fast displacing PHP, ASP, and J2EE as the development framework of choice for discriminating programmers, thanks to its elegant design and emphasis on practical results. RailsSpace teaches you to build large-scale projects with Rails by developing a real-world application: a social networking website like MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster.

Inside, the authors walk you step by step from the creation of the site's virtually static front page, through user registration and authentication, and into a highly dynamic site, complete with user profiles, image upload, email, blogs, full-text and geographical search, and a friendship request system. In the process, you learn how Rails helps you control code complexity with the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, abstraction layers, automated testing, and code refactoring, allowing you to scale up to a large project even with a small number of developers.

This essential introduction to Rails provides

A tutorial approach that allows you to experience Rails as it is actually used A solid foundation for creating any login-based website in Rails Coverage of newer and more advanced Rails features, such as form generators, REST, and Ajax (including RJS) A thorough and integrated introduction to automated testing

The book's companion website provides the application source code, a blog with follow-up articles, narrated screencasts, and a working version of the RailSpace social network.

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Greatg starter book for RoR

This book is teriffic. I started my journey into RoR by buying the two canonical starter books, Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide and Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition. These are solid, rich repositories of information, but I was still having trouble understanding many concepts and techniques. Then I got this book. Concepts that had eluded me or been difficult suddenly became clear and intuitive. These authors really lead you by the hand through elements of RoR that may be unfamiliar to developers coming from other tools. The standard "starter" books are still must-haves for the would-be RoR developer, but I say this one is really the one to start with.

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Great Intro to Ruby on Rails

If you're thinking about getting this then stop now and just do it. It's a great introduction to RoR that is fun and practical.

Simply put, you construct a really simple social network with the book. I'm only half finished with it, but the stuff I've learned will be invaluable on other projects. The author sprinkles in some humor the whole way along.

One of the really great things is the testing and refactoring of code. They show you how to do something quickly and then they also take the time to go back and clean up code and do things more efficiently, while maintaining integrity through RoR's testing.

It's awesome, and I've already purchased another copy to give away as a gift.

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Smacks of zealotry

You know you're in trouble when a nerd draws comparisons between anything on his computer and sex, and that's unfortunately what happens in the first few paragraphs of this book's introduction. That sort of attitude--which is later parroted mindlessly by the inexperienced schoolchildren who come to idolize their IRC superiors--is also what makes a lot of people hate Rails. It's an MVC framework, not the second coming.

Nevertheless, there are times when it is simply the best tool for the job--like when you're roughing in an application whose ultimate behavior and purpose are nebulous and fluid. At times like these, you don't need anything that runs "well" or "quickly," you need something that lets you implement new ideas on a whim without any significant commitment that might lead to mental ossification or irrational attachment to something you spent too much time on. This book does a pretty good job of showing you how to do just that even if it does read like some Evangelical doctrine. At least Dave Thomas doesn't get any money out of it.

Some of it's a bit outdated, but they have an errata page on their site, and it's not like you're supposed to use any of this code on a real production site anyway. I'd say it's worth picking up.

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Mediocre for an experienced coder

I found this book frustrating. About 70 pages into the the tutorial I realized I was monkey-typing and had no real idea what was going on -- things were happening, but I didn't understand *why*. I abandoned the book for another in the same series (The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series). That book is easily twice as long and does nothing but introduce Rails, and although it was a hard slog to read I found it a much, much better introduction to the technology -- and possibly more importantly for Rails, the conceptual framework needed to use it.

At the end of the day, you want to walk away from an introductory book with a real understanding of the topic. I believe this book's dual focus (social networking + Rails intro) distracted the authors from clearly introducing Rails. This may be a useful introduction for a novice software developer, but if you want to really understand what Rails is doing and prepare yourself for doing real development, I cannot recommend it.

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

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