Okay, so I have to admit I am not entirely a Rails noob. I have built a couple of applications using Rails and continue to maintain an interest in its emergence in the enterprise. However, since Rails 2.x has come out, I’ve fallen a bit behind and needed a quick refresher. Learning Rails, by Simon St. Laurent and Edd Dumbill seemed to be a good candidate. It didn’t disappoint.
Learning Rails is an excellent book for quickly picking up the nuances of Rails, especially if you are looking for something that is an easy read and is based upon Rails 2.x+. The chapters are relatively short and the authors do an excellent job of knowing how far to push a concept before deferring (referring) to alternate texts for more information. Nonetheless, I picked up a few new tidbits along the way, including some practical suggestions for dealing with nested resources and a couple of ideas for routing. However, make no mistake about it, this is not an advanced Rails text. For more detail, I would look into Obie Fernandez’ excellent “Rails Way” or the myriad of books on specific topics such as AJAX, Active Record, etc.
What could have been better? I thought the chapter on AJAX was a bit weak. The example code didn’t seem as elegant as you may expect from a Rails purest. Also, there was not much coverage on the concept of layouts and how the location of the various view pages relate to MVC routing, etc. I suspect even the most inexperienced Rails developer will quickly embrace the idea of layouts and partials (which were covered to some extent in the forms section). Finally, there was not much mention of some of the newer features such as localization (probably more of an enterprise feature anyway).
One thing the author cautioned is that the book is written from the “outside in”. In the preface, this was clarified to mean that the approach taken in this book was to present it from more of a traditional web developer’s perspective rather than, say, an enterprise application developer’s perspective. It was cautioned that certain readers may be turned off by this approach. I suspect that I am likely in the category of enterprise developer since I do think in terms of MVC architectures, etc. My background is NOT in building simple scripted PHP web apps for low budget clients. However, I was NOT turned off by the approach. I thought everything was explained nicely and accurately, regardless of the audience. So for you Enterprise Java purists out there, don’t be put off by the subtitle.
This book is highly recommended for those just starting out in Rails.
