Deploying Rails Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide

I currently bought three books on how to develop and produce Web-Based applications using Ruby on Rails. All three would not provide me the ability to deploy effectively on my deployment site. Deploying Rails Applications provided me all the insights I needed to tackle the key issues on the remote site. Active Record migrations was a serious stumbling block before. Configuring the Web Server was a show blocker. The decision on the a dedicated host was also a key element in the production. However, my site does not support Mongrel and thus I could not benefit for the books recommendations. Overall, it is a very good read with a technical language that is accessible to all. Bernard Carrier

The value provided by this book is quite subtle. It is when you are faced with a task of deploying something you don't quite understand and are uncertain of which way to go. I had to upgrade the app that I had inherited from Capistrano 1.4.1./Deprec gem 1.9.2 to Capistrano 2.5.0 and was not quite sure of how to go about it. The app also used mongrel clusters that I did not know well. I realized that I did not quite undertstand how Capistrano worked in the first place. I had many references, all good mind you, but did not fully get it until I sat down with Ezra's book this week-end evening and went through it again focusing on chapters on Capistrano and Mongrels. This time though, I had a sense of purpose, i.e., to get this migration task done. Ezra really has been through many deployments and communicates that knowledge in a very useful and fundamental way. The next morning, I cleaned up my muddled script and was able to debug it within an hour and deployed it successfully. It is working quite well. Thanks Ezra. Now if you could do a detailed book on Phusion Passenger, I would buy it. Bharat

This is a superb book, the best compact writeups i've seen on setting up Apache load balancing and proxies, nginx, mongrel, SVN server and repos, DNS, MySql caching, capistrano, rake, profiling apps (and there's a lot of blogs, books on these subjects. Entire mailing lists, in fact). Compact means they don't go into every option or configuration conceivable, you get everything (to almost 2 sigma) you need to know to get it going reliably, scalably, loggably, plus a lot of hard-won knowledge about what can go wrong. Just not quite the detail they go into, in, say the Frisch and Nemeth/Snyder/Hein unix admin books. I think for a lot of people (many java or PHP devs don't have to worry about the infrastructure of their production boxes, they had STDIFT (somebody to do it for them), this is a must have. This book isn't perfect. What it covers it covers beautifully, what it doesn't cover, well, it kinda slows down to 30 MPH for a red light. Witness pp 234-5: covers nested sets, STI, indexes and normalization, AR duck typing, polymorphic associations. Geez, that's a lotta topics for slightly less than 1 page. Well, they're outside the scope of this treatment and there aren't a lot of references given. What about all the Yslow stuff that everybody's talking about: JS /CSS compression/lazy loading, CDN, reduce DNS lookups. Some topics are here, some aren't. Basically, that's what you worry about after you've dug thru logfiles and profiled, topics this book covers in excellent depth. There are a few editing/editorial slips. 3 authors flip-flop between debian/ubuntu & RH/centOS/FC families (and don't talk about FreeBSD /solaris). Page 92 seems to suggest the default Leopard ruby install is fine. p 212: they're comparing a ubuntu, single CPU machine against a 2-cpu, windows machine running ??. I figure the editor should have said "huh?". and p 172 they write a lot about mySQL clustering limitations, when they could've talked about postgres instead of/in addition to. But really with stuff they could've written about, we're talking about a 600 page book, not this 250 page book with nice margins, easy to read fonts. So that' s my story and i'm sticking to it.

I buy a lot of books, mostly Ruby and Rails books. Most of them are follow-me guides that don't explain anything. Sure, ya did it, but you don't know why. Not this one. Ezra Zygmuntowicz actually explains how it works, why you need to do it and then, how to do it. And few people know as much about deployment. This is an extremely well written, "must have" reference. TW Scannell