Professional Ruby on Rails

Professional RoR is the best book ever for a modestly experienced Web developer like myself. It thoroughly addresses all those little issues that are essential to developing a sound website. With the Well-grounded Rubyist and Pro Active Record, you've the best reference material for RoR development IMHO.

This is a fantastic book specifically geared at people who know Ruby and Rails. It says this in the opening chapter, and infers this in the title- "Professional Rails". So it's funny to see a review here complaining that you would be lost if you didn't Ruby and Rails. And, as the other reviewer mentioned, it actually writes the tests! Better yet, it often writes the test first. And thank god there wasn't another "intro to ruby/intro to rails/installing rails" chapter at the beginning. Hell, it doesn't even say what a generator and pretty much starts "rails -d mysql soupsonline" with no explanation. This is fantastic! I was so excited. Most of the first chapter discusses REST and TDD (test driven development) laying a foundation for more advanced rails applications and development techniques. As REST is relatively new to Rails, and a more advanced topic, I thought it was a great start. Routes are on page 8, and Ajax is already in the app by the end of chapter 1 (page 34). Chapter 2 is using subversion, which at first I was leary of, but then quite accepting. Subversion (and now Git, which unfortunately wasn't big yet when the book was written) is a critical part of the advanced rails development workflow and this chapter is very rails centric in exposing best practices and tips. I did a lot rails programming back in 2005, and recently picked it up again. This books was by far the most relevant for me, offering high value for time invested and effectively covering newer Rails developments (migrations, ajax support, capistrano, mongrel, etc.). Also exciting was the fact that this was one of 10 different ruby and/or rails books at the bookstore. If you are an experienced developer moving to Ruby and Rails, I'd also recommend this book. Take this and the Flannagan/Matz book and you'll be flying in no time. If you are just moving to Rails 2, this book is perfect as well. An if you've been working on Rails 2 and want to move to the next level, I think this is also a great book. As an aside, I generally love the Wrox books. They are uniquely positioned to experienced developers and written by people who are scary in their expertise. They are also written in very clear prose- advanced material without the complex language of experts. Highly recommended.