Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional

this book is an excellent introductory book to ruby on rails. i read chapters 1 through 9 (out of 13) for now, for work. i read _agile web development with rails_ as my first rails book, and although that was also a good book, i would highly recommend _beginning ruby on rails e-commerce_ first before _agile_ to a rails newcomer, especially to one looking for a gentle introduction, and/or may feel rusty with past programming. _beginning ruby on rails e-commerce_ is very readable. the story that you follow to build an online bookstore flows naturally and easily. the order/presentation of the material covered to learn about for rails from how to set up controllers, models, and views to installing plug-ins and gems needed to integrating a bit of ajax-related tools is extremely organized and well done. getting an authorize.net account can take a few/several days, so i recommend requesting one online about a week before you anticipate working through chapter 9: checkout and order processing. there are several typos, some easily noticeable and others not, some that do cause problems if you didn't know about them. therefore, it would be a good idea to follow along with the errata online available at the apress site in a browser tab as you work through the book. i myself submitted about a dozen typos that were not included in the errata at the time of this review. overall, this book is very well done. there haven't been many technical books i have read that i have been thrilled with, and this is one of those few. i went through a shared work copy, and anticipate purchasing a copy for myself soon.

This is not the best Ruby book (pickaxe), nor the best Rails book (DT+DHH's AWDWR). It is not even the best for Rails tips and tricks (Fowler's Recipes). But it does give an outstanding picture of how an RoR application can be evolved from simple beginnings, applying and enhancing the original app through to a professional shopping cart solution. This book would serve really well as the guide (and starting point) on a RoR journey for a VB or Java developer who was impatient to try RoR. Get the basics up and running and extend. Deals well with the enterprise/development lifecycle and how it relates to RoR development including testing. etc. Just buy it (and the others listed above). You won't regret it. Gerard Byrne

I am not done with this book yet and have taken a detour in going through David Black's Ruby For Rails book first. Those who have NO significant prior development experience and are not comfortable picking up on minor omissions on their own should stay away from this book. But people with experience especially in Web Development who are a bit operating system savvy and can work around minor gliches will find this book a tremendous resource. Moreover, one of the authors has started a web discussion group to discuss these specific problems. I have quite a bit of experience in Web E-Commerce development, and I find this book a fundamental resource is teaching me how powerful indeed Ruby on Rails is for integrating some of the more specialized technologies such as search engines. I also found that the "lack" of Ruby experience was becomiing a factor in being able to thoroughly understand and leverage the wealth of information presented in the book. Hence I took the detour into David Black's book which is also very good. The only reason I did not give a full five star rating to this book is that the omissions can indeed send you off on a tangent researching things which should otherwise take a short time.

This book is an awesome and in depth look at all aspects of building a successful e-commerce site. It guides you through the development of a working e-commerce site using Test Driven Development and Rails best practices. It was worth every penny.