The Rails Way

This is *the* rails book to get. Even if you're an experienced Rails developer, you'll find loads of great information and advice. The real-world examples are really helpful. Includes an excellent tour through the framework itself. This is one of the few Rails books that covers testing well. Obie is obviously a Jedi.

I think the classic "Agile Web Development with Rails" is a better book for learning about Rails. But while this book comes in second in that category (which ain't bad), I think as a reference it comes in first. One thing I especially like about this book is that he explains *why* certain things are the way they are. Quite a few times I found myself thinking, "So *that's* why it's like that" or "So *that's* why they did it that way". Good stuff.

This is an outstanding book. It's not a good introduction to Rails, which it isn't intended to be, but for someone who knows the basics of Rails this book is both an essential reference and a valuable tutorial on the deeper aspects of Rails. Despite the fact that it is, at its heart, a reference, there's so much insight in the descriptions that it's a great tutorial as well for the intermediate Rails developer.

I've been waiting for this book since the Sample chapter on activeRecord was released. I suspected this book would answer all the people decrying Rails lack of (java or PHP-like) docs. Well, it is breathtaking in its scope (really), it is the definitive working dev's reference to the APIs, development, testing and deployment best practices and most widely adopted/tested plugins and gems (with a few holes). I believe every dev should go thru the table of contents slowly and carefully (several times). Obie F seems to have assembled a huge team of resources to collaborate on each chapter, and it shows in exhaustive coverage. The table of contents entry for the testing chapter is 2 1/2 pages long and rspec is separate from that. So when i hit a problem, i think i'll hit this book first, then google rails mailing lists, and the intarweb tubes. Negatives (cause I'm looking for perfection): - footnotes are clustered at each chapter's end. Good luck finding a superscript number in a 75-page chapter. -typesetting needs work. It doesn't clearly convey a hierarchy of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics , there's just lot of serif, non-serif, bold, italics and sizes on pages that walk through APIs (ajax, ActiveSupport chapters). Better to use outline-style numbering (e.g. Pragmatics). p. 229: the code example mixes an opening single-quote and backticks. Bad, bad. - a number of what could be considered core topics are not covered: search/indexing libraries (ferret, solr, sphinx), HAML/SASS, pinging and site stats libs like mint, god, AWStats, etc. Postgres (this is a biggie), they recommend deploying to Mysql and Redhat/Centos/Debian /gentoo without much detail. textmate/vim/emacs/eclipse. source control libs like darcs and git. Rspec *is* given 30 pages, this is big. (There's not room for detailed discussion, but they could have mentioned these things ina sentence somewhere. most of these topics are covered in detail somewhere in blogspace, except for ferret/solr/sphinx deployment strategies, where you have to read mailing list archives. - rails is on cusp of widespread adoption of release 2. I haven't seen anywhere that AW or Safari online books plans to issue regular PDF or online updates to the book. This is the main criticism if it is correct, relative to how Pragmatic has been releasing its books.

This is a hefty tome. I have just begun to crack it. My colleagues and I, all professional Rails developers, readily agreed that the detail in this book is remarkable. I opened to a random page and found brief discussions of every option to one of Rails's methods. Note that this book doesn't start at zero, it is definitely a reference work. And that is a most welcome development for the Rails community. I think this effort deserves to be the new standard Rails book. Full disclosure: Obie has done some side work for my employer and I am acquainted with him. I do think I'd be saying the same thing if I'd never heard of the author.