Reviews for Head First Rails: A learner's companion to Ruby on Rails

1. Totally tripendicular, baby

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

   Risking black-balling from the lifelong Perl camp and having learned Ruby via a so-so stramash of Ruby books I decided to find out what all the fuss was about with this Rails malarkey and bought Head First Rails as my book.
   
   All I can say is, this is a fabulous book, a novel and effective way of teaching something, and Rails is looking very interesting indeed. I've been working through it after work (I should get a life, I know, but it's summer and the digital TV signal has died behind the leafy trees) and didn't get bored at all. Armed with new found knowledge have now ordered another book to maybe come at it from a different angle. Or maybe not.
   
   Now if UK ISPs got their act together with hobbyist Rails hosting...

2. On the right lines

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12th, 2009

   I've used Head First books before and was looking forward to working thorugh this one to bring my knowledge into the 21st century. Like all Head First books, it is well thought out, entertaining and contains lots of useful exercises to help you understand things. A couple of provisos - the scenario they gave where you were going to help out a friend by creating a complete application in a weekend became a bit ironic. This was because the version of Rails that I picked up didn't have SQLite3 (the database engine) in it any more, which stopped things in their tracks so to speak. It was fairly easy to download it separately, but even then it didn't work without quite a bit of trawling the web to find the rather obscure command to get it talking to Rails properly. Not HF's fault, but perhaps they could have put more info on their website. Speaking of which, when you had to download things from the HF website to do exercises, it wasn't always immediately obvious which bits you needed.
   
   Otherwise it did what it said on the tin and I can recommend it.

3. Great introduction if you know some programming and HTML

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, July 12st, 2009

   Don't try to read this book from cover to cover. You'll understand the basics, but the only way to use this book to its full potential is to do the excercises.
   
   If you know some programming and HTML this book will bring you up to speed quickly. You will only learn the basics and if your head is full of ideas you'll want to learn more, but this book will be an excellent preparation.
   
   I wanted to understand what Ruby on Rails is and how it works and this book helped me doing just that in a short period of time. Great value for my money!

4. An Absolute Godsend

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

   I have been trying to find out about Rails for a while now and have found a lot of the information and training is for older versions, boring, or doesn't make sense. If you are a windows user and want to explore rails and get up to speed on the core basics Just download instant rails and follow this book. It's the most enjoyable, easiest to follow book I have ever read. I never write reviews but was so overjoyed with this book I was compelled to write something.
   
   This is a complete book for beginners on the subject. If you are already upto speed with some of rails functionality, it may be worth looking elsewhere for something more indepth and chunky.
   
   Beginners - I Love This Book!!!!!!!!!!!

5. I love this book!

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

   I've been eagerly anticipating Head First Rails, and it didn't disappoint. I'm a Java developer, and I've wanted to convert to Rails for quite some time. I tried other books, but they seemed to gloss over a lot of the details about how Rails actually works, and I found it difficult to get a real handle on it. Not this book. After working through Head First Rails, I feel as though I really know what's going on, it's less of a mystery to me. I'm amazed by what I could do by the end of the book, and the Google maps application at the end is just awesome! And I just love the chapter on Ajax, it made it way clearer to me what was going on.