books:

	Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers David Black Manning Publications, 2006 - 532 pages average customer review:based on 55 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Ruby for Rails, written by Ruby expert David Black (with a forward by David Heinemeier Hansson), helps Rails developers achieve Ruby mastery. Each chapter deepens your Ruby knowledge and shows you how it connects to Rails. You'll gain confidence working with objects and classes and learn how to leverage Ruby's elegant, expressive syntax for Rails application power. And you'll become a better Rails developer through a deep understanding of the design of Rails itself and how to take advantage of it.

Newcomers to Ruby will find a Rails-oriented Ruby introduction that's easy to read and that includes dynamic programming techniques, an exploration of Ruby objects, classes, and data structures, and many neat examples of Ruby and Rails code in action. Ruby for Rails: the Ruby guide for Rails developers!

What's Inside Classes, modules, and objects Collection handling and filtering String and regular expression manipulation Exploration of the Rails source code Ruby dynamics Many more programming concepts and techniques!

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Solid explanations of important concepts

There are some core books one should have when working with Ruby and Rails. This is one of them. Many reviews have already been written about this book, some good, some not so good. Regardless, I won't rehash what they said. The two cents I'm throwing in is this: I like the way David explains things. It gives you a better understanding of the topic, and the more you *understand*, the less you have to remember.


Teaches Ruby using Rails

Approaching this book, I wasn't quite sure where the emphasis lay, and who this was aimed at. To be clear then, I recommend this book to an intermediate Ruby programmer, who is interested in using examples from Rails to help cement their learning. It would also probably help to have the vaguest idea of what Rails is, and the sorts of web apps it's useful for. If you're an existing Rails developer, this is a great way to get a better understanding of what's going on, but it's not a tutorial on Rails for a complete newbie, nor does it provide advanced Rails practices.

Unlike many programming books, which focus on procedural programming before building up to classes, RfR is admirably object oriented in focus from the word go. It's quite impressive that conditionals aren't introduced until about 200 pages in. Also notable is the chapter on metaprogramming, which is very good. If you felt a bit short-changed by the coverage of this subject in The Pickaxe, this is much better.

Material on Rails top and tail the book: the first part introduces Rails by building a simple web app, and the final chapters rejig it with enhanced models, views and controllers, based on the Ruby material in the middle.

In short, this is more of a Ruby book than a Rails book, and I was very happy with that. This is well worth getting even if you have no interest in web apps.

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More Ruby Less Rails

Another review for this book uses the perfect word: Wordy!

The book reads like it was written for, either somebody completely new to programming, or somebody who can't read. My gripe isn't so much the content, but how it is presented. I found myself skipping many paragraphs because the author goes over the same thing multiple times, not trusting that the reader got the point the first time around.

I'd give this book 4 stars if it was half as short, and there's no reason it couldn't be. Why not 5 stars? Because the content is, like other reviews say, primarily centered around Ruby, with too little about Rails to comfortably use 'rails' in the title.

It's a good Beginning-Ruby book, and it has some good info about both Ruby and Rails, but I would have preferred getting a book dedicated specifically to Ruby, and another book dedicated specifically to Rails.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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