Advanced Rails: Building Industrial-Strength Web Apps in Record Time

Although the title suggest otherwise, Advanced Rails is really required reading for anyone using Rails - beginners and gurus alike. The information provided is excellent, with essential tips and sound advice. In particular, the chapters on routing, security, internationalization and database issues are well worth the purchase price. Like Obie's The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series), this book should live on your desk in your workspace. What's missing? Well, it would have been nice to see information on Git considering the effort put into covering source control systems. It's also surprising that there is not more on testing techniques and issues. But overall, this book is fantastic, and chocked full of juicy info you won't find in any of the other Rails books currently available.

This book is almost worth it just for the first chapter's dive into Ruby metaprogramming, but the rest of the book doesn't disappoint. Ediger delivers useful advice regarding available methods, alternatives and considerations that all serious web developers should take into account. This book should be non-optional for all Rails development teams, as it has some of the most sane and sober treatment of relevant topics I've ever read in a single book. From security to databases to deployment, this book gives the reader a solid foundation in nearly all of the major disciplines involved in building web applications.

I collect every ruby / rails book. So I purchased this book without checking the content. I read the first chapter during the weekend and found this books is really helpful. This books teaches advanced Ruby and Rails in simple and clear style. I am too eager to continue read the book, so I will stop here. BTW, I feel the order of books a rails programmer should read is: The Official Ruby on rails books, 2nd edition The Official Ruby book or the Ruby way --then do a few rails projects and continue with this book.

I've been developing in ruby for a few years, and rails seriously for less than a year, but reading voraciously, and I own a couple dozen ruby and rails books (including outdated 1st editions). THis one is unique, it's a smallish (325 pages)packed with info that other books deemed too hard to explain or inessential for beginners. Some of the chapters are too much information for me (especially i18n, UTF-8 and localization) but that's because of the nature of my work. The chapters on metaprogramming/ rails coding techniques, database usage, profiling, performance tuning, security and are truly outstanding. Like i said for Scott Raymond's Ajax on rails, this author is a technical master and an excellent communicator. The explanations are efficient, and move right along. The english is tight and typo-free, illustrations, screen shots and code snippets are all useful. There are techniques discussed here, such as using MQ (or git-add) in conjunction with benchmarking/profiling, that I would say if you don't know them, your rails development team simply will not be competitive, and make no mistake, this has become a very competitive market. I would recommend that every rail dev read this cover to cover. This is now one of my 4 favorite ruby/rails books (the others: "Rails Way", Black's "Ruby for Rails", and "Ajax on Rails") What's not in the book: domain modeling, UML, denormalization, those kinds of topics. It's not a data modelling/ activeRecord book. Ajax (pretty well covered in other books), except as it relates to performance and security. Nitpicks: it's not quite perfect,: - mercurial coverage: i would prefer git and darcs coverage, or at least a mention. The CVS discussion is superfluous, also. - weak index: on a few occasions, space is devoted to configuring apache (p. 106, 136). Do they show up in the index under Apache? Also nginx only rates a mention as the leading reverse proxy. There's an index entry for "code"(?!). Not indexed: facets, evil (p 45), money gem (p. 224), ... This is an extremely important (time-saving) thing, I would be willing to pay 3x the price for a well-indexed book. - search engines (p 169) I wouldn't concede ferret is industry leader, he should have mentioned the SOLR and sphinx plugins - the bit about PHP security, p 131 seems irrelevant. - some other points could have been footnoted: class variables and inheritance in 1.9 is still being debated by the ruby core team (p 20) and plugin load order is also under debate (p 75).