Reviews for Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers)

1. Great Book

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   A must-have for learning Rails. By the end of the first section, you have a working version of the Rails application that's easy to follow and has lots of best practices. I understand that building apps with Rails is easy, but this book makes that process even easier. On the downside though, the second-half of the book has a lot of heavy stuff, too much theory. Although it is presented gently, I think more examples would be definitely a plus.
   
   All in all, it's a great book! Looking forward to the next version of the Rails and the book.

2. A good read for all developers

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2009

   Not only is this a great introduction to the marvelous Rails framework, it is also an easy read. Technical authors can learn a lot from this book on how to write quality 'how to' books. I'll also say that even if you don't intend to use Ruby and Rails for your web developement, this book is still useful; I use PHP but I've taken a lot of the ideas from this book and applied them my work.

3. great resource for experienced oo programmers

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2009

   This is a well written book and should get you off to a good start using rails if you are an experienced OO programmer and have a working knowledge of ruby.

4. The standard for Rails

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2009

   By far the best Rails book money can buy, and I've browsed most of them if not all.
   
   First, if you still had doubts, YES you need a book to really get a good, rapid grip on rails. It's moving at lightning speed, in fact a new release showed up a few days after this 3rd edition went to print. A recent rails book is worth a million outdated screencasts and hacked together tutorials.
   
   The review process is worth mentionning. Each edition of this book go through a long beta process where it is reviewed by 'beta readers' - this edition went through 10 iterations for example. This means you'll find far less typos than in other books, and a lot more 'best practices'.
   
   I've taught a lot and I find this book to be of far higher standards than a lot of 'official' material out there developed for closed-source products.
   
   One thing though, this book definitely assumes you've got some programming experience, preferably OO background, so I wouldn't consider it to be a 'beginner book' (to be fair it's not advertised as such). Rails itself is similar to this book - you need to have developed a lot of prior applications to truly appreciate its elegance.
   
   I also recommend you have a look at their website, Pragmatic Programmer, where you can get an electronic copy of the book in PDF and kindle format, well worth it.

5. a word of caution

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2008

   I bought this book. Its well written, with a good style. However
   
   The current book is written for Rails 1.2.X - the current version is 2.2.2, and version 2.2.3 is imminent (v3 for beta in May).
   
   While not vastly different, tehre are a number of changes (dynamic scaffolding ahs been depreciated and following the example given in the book will fail here, for example. The default database has changed to SLQlite (for mac users I guess)
   
   You really need something, as even web tutorials dont touch on the differences well.
   
   This book is pretty much the bible, and unless you want to go with the beta copy of the next edition (in PDF) - its your best bet. Just be aware, there are some more streamlined (if that can be believed!) ways of doing certain tasks with the latest release.
   
   The other option is to install a rails 1.2.X build - I dont think that this is too hard - there seem to be a lot of resource online to help. You would then (at your liesure) have retrain yourself to the latest version. I opted to try to modify the example (and I am a beginner) - and its difficult, but not impossible.
   
   The book would have been 5 stars otherwise.

6. Not Good For A Beginner To Programming

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2008

   I'm an experienced developer in HTML and CSS so I thought I'd try my hand at my first real programming and hop on the latest band wagon of Ruby on Rails.
   
   I boldy read my way through Chapters 1 and 2, having to refer to the web for definitions on acronyms I didn't know and re-read some of the particularly jargon-filled paragraphs that made assumptions about what I already knew thinking "Ok, it seems a bit tricky, but I understand the concepts so I'm sure I'll get the hang of it once I hit the real examples." I didn't even get to the real examples.
   
   The installation section is a real let-down. Using Mac OS Leopard, I am informed that I have all of the tools, I just need to enable them, where it then tells me to go on a load of web sites to look up how to do this. Totally unhelpful. I'm sure that seasoned programmers know how to set up their particular environments and that using Ruby on Rails is just some small tweaks to their command lines and off they go, but I was left um-ing and argh-ing as I downloaded tool after tool and followed online tutorial after online tutorial trying to work out what the hell I was supposed to be doing.
   
   Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I assumed that by buying a rather pricey book that you'd get all the info in the book, rather than having to rummage around the web, and maybe the tools should be included on a disc or to download from a dedicated web site or something?
   
   Needless to say, I gave up and have bought Sitepoint's 'Simply Rails 2.' Having read a lot of Sitepoint books in the past, I'm hoping that this will live up to their standards- I'll post a review to that when I'm a bit further in!

7. Great Book but currently out of date

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, June 12rd, 2008

   At the time of writing this review, the current edition of the book (edition 2) is out of date and is not designed for Rails 2.0.
   
   So although this is a marvellous in depth book, if you have no experience in Rails development their are to many workarounds to use the book with the current rails release. This being said it is possible to run an older edition of Rails on your computer, and therefore you can follow the book.
   
   If you have previous experience in web development using PHP, then check out Rails For PHP developers. I have been using this book to get up to speed with rails and have found it a great help.

8. Great but remember to use Rails 1.2.6

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2008

   This book is very well structured and written but if you are new to RAILS remember to use version 1.2.6 to avoid incompatibility issues.
   
   Hopefully we'll get a new version soon with all the examples compatible with RAILS version 2.0.

9. Great Starting Point

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2007

   This book gave me a great starting point for building an e-commerce website in Ruby on Rails. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to dive into Ruby on Rails.