Simply Rails 2 | 
 enlarge | Author: Patrick Lenz
Publisher: SitePoint
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 12285
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 450
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0980455200
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.117
EAN: 9780980455205
ASIN: 0980455200
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
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Product Description
Want to learn all about Ruby on Rails 2.0, the web application framework that is inspiring developers around the world? The second edition of this practical, hands on book will: - show you how to install Ruby on Rails on Windows, Mac, or Linux
- walk you, step by step, through the development of a Web 2.0 social news application, just like digg.com
- show you how to test, debug, benchmark, and deploy your Rails application
Unlike other Rails books, this book doesn't assume that you are an experienced web developer, or that you've used Ruby before. An entire chapter is devoted to learning Ruby in a fun way, using the interactive Ruby console, so you can follow along at home. You'll be an accomplished Ruby programmer in no time! The example application that the book builds - a user-generated news web site - is built upon with each following chapter, and concepts such as sessions, cookies and basic AJAX usage are gradually introduced. Different aspects of Rails, such as user authentication, session cookies, and automated testing are explored with each feature that is added to the application. The book finishes with chapters on debugging, benchmarking and deployment to a live web server. By the end of the book, you'll have built a fully-featured Web 2.0 application and deployed it to the Web. And all code is up-to-date for Rails 2.0, so you can begin coding immediately with the latest version of Rails. What Will You Learn?
This book will teach you how to: - Program with confidence in the Ruby language.
- Build and deploy a complete Rails web application.
- Exploit the new features available in Rails 2.
- Use Rails' Ajax features to create slick interfaces.
- Reap the benefits of a best-practice MVC architecture.
- Work with databases easily using ActiveRecord.
- Implement RESTful development patterns and clean URLs.
- Create a user authentication system.
- Use object oriented concepts like inheritance and polymorphism.
- Build a comprehensive automated testing suite for your application.
- Add plugins to easily enhance your application's functionality.
- Use migrations to manage your database schema without data loss.
- Achieve maximum code reuse with filters and helper functions.
- Debug your application using the ruby_debug client.
- Analyze your application's performance using the Rails logging infrastructure.
- Benchmark your application to determine performance bottlenecks.
- And a whole lot more
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Beginner book only September 1, 2008
This book is useful for those who need to be taken by the hand, and taken step by step. After going thru the book, you have built a simple web site, but are not able to build your own. If you are brand new to Ruby on Rails, this may be your starter book, but will need to follow up with Agile Web Development with Rails.
 very lucid explanation; book has some limitations August 28, 2008
THis is one of hte best beginner web app books i have ever seen (I've read books on rails, PHP , django, Zope, but not too much on .NET, ASP or java). The author takes the approach that he will introduce one coherent topic at a time thoroughly, with as little source code as possible, without digressions, exceptions or comparisons to other languages (perl, PHP, java). This he does admirably.
If i had to comment on the books limitations, i would say that there are a lot of topics that are glossed over: CSS, regular expressions. e.g. page 175, regexs are confusing. I would've said that regex's are important in rails: validations, generating URL slugs, etc, and there are a lot of good resources, and also verbose mode to make them more readable. The book is pretty well indexed but "regular expressions" doesn't appear in index.
When you finish reading this carefully, you still won't know enough to look up issues in teh Rails Way book, which is where a aspiring Rails developer needs to be to find work. The book doesn't provide the next steps, e.g. never mentions the most often used rails plugins, ImageMagick, acts as solr/ferret, restful_auth, etc, doesn't mention any browser issues or DBMS issues.
But for somebody who's never done web apps, this book would have a much high comprehension rate than most others (the Dummies rails book was good, but now outdated). So for target demographic, highly recommended.
I would also say that the book's ruby overview is kind of inadequate (rails books either do a handholding ruby in 25 pages chapter, or a detailed view of metaprogramming, gotchas and edge/corner cases). I prefer the latter (as in Ediger "advanced Rails" and Rappin "Professional Rails", both superb books)
A great start, but not comprehensive August 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a great start, but you won't be able to write applications in Ruby on Rails by the end of it.
Let me refine that: you will be able to write one Ruby on Rails application by the end of it. The book walks you through creating a program that works like Digg. The book explains well everything that you need to do to write this one program, and introduces you to the basics of RoR architecture and how RoR works. I followed the instructions and understood everything that was going on.
However, once you have finished this book and written your Digg-like program, there is no guidance for where to go next. There isn't a chapter on "Further Resources" or "Where to go from here" or anything at all - you're just stuck with your little Digg-imitation. Not only that, but the book tends to introduce information in a rather haphazard order. From a pedagogy standpoint, the order in which information is presented makes a lot of sense. But it makes the book useless as a reference manual, or even as a model for how to do your own project.
It's fine as a first step and as an introduction to Ruby on Rails, especially since at the moment it's the only thing in print about Rails 2.x. But you will have to read other books before you can be a competent RoR programmer.
A little vague August 4, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am new to programming. I did a lot of it back 20 years ago, but am new to object oriented programming and just starting to learn programming again. I am about 1/2 way thru the book and have found myself now reading other books (Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper is one) to try and fill in the blanks. The book takes the approach of developing a web application from the git go. I like this approach, but it glosses over WHY we are doing it. I found myself wondering why, more than saying "oh yeah, that makes sense". Maybe the fact that I am new to this wonderful programming world has a lot to do with it, but the book calls itself the "the ultimate programmers guide" so I guess I expected more from it. Overall it is an OK book, but the Agile book by Dave Thompson seems to do a better job of walking thru developing a web app.
 Simply The Best July 25, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I just can't praise this book enough. Rails make it easy to build websites. And this book makes it easy to learn rails. This book is the simplest,easiest and fastest route to rails for beginners. If you want to learn rails and if you are new to ruby then this is the book for you. I haven't seen any other rails book that is nearly as good. This book doesn't expect you to be an experienced developer. Just some basic knowledge of HTML is all that is required to get started.
This is a tutorial. You have to sit next to the computer and work along as you read. It gives clear step by step instructions and lots of helpful explanations and tips.
Most rails book assume you already know the ruby language. But this book lets you dive straight into rails after giving you a quick introduction to ruby.
Although this book is really about rails, the quick introduction to programming it gives you at the beginning the the book is one of the best I have ever seen. The author has done a terrific job!
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