Reviews for Rails Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

1. Poor choice of title...

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2007

   This book puzzled me at first; it isn't the normal cookbook formula pioneered by O'Reilly. The Perl Cookbook, for example, starts where Learning Perl and Programming Perl leave off, with recipe style examples of advanced and complex problems. The Rails Cookbook takes an entirely different approach: the content is roughly the same as that worked through on the Pragmatic Studios 3 day class, with a worked example for every topic. As such, it works more as an introductory tutorial to Rails than the advanced workbook that the title leads us to expect.
   
   I was a little disappointed by the section on REST; all of this section was by a different author (as some of the other individual recipes are), but was laid in front of us like a slab of cold, dead meat, not integrated into the rest of the book. This gave me the impression that it had been written for release 1.1 or Rails, but had sat on shelf for some months for a brisk makeover and eventual release. I liked the section on Capistrano, which gives us some additional tasks that are of practical use.
   
   If you want a Rails Cookbook, buy Chad Fowler's Rails Recipes; but if you want a practical introductory text on Rails, this is probably the best, suited to sit alongside Agile Web Development with Rails.

2. A reasonable companion to ADROR

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, May 12th, 2006

   A few months ago I previewed the Rough Cuts version of 'Rails Cookbook' and at that stage there was very little to merit it. However it seems the bulk of the material now covered in this book was added just prior to release.
   
   The 'Rails Cookbook' serves as a reasonable companion to 'Agile Development with Ruby on Rails' (one of the must have tomes on the subject). Whereas ADROR generally devotes a chapter per aspect of the framework, Cookbook instead takes a 'task by section approach' so for instance you have a section called 'Modelling a Database with Active Record'. Several of the chapters covered the same ground, and where they do Rails Cookbook differs by working through the examples with the Rails Console.
   
   This book won't gain you the further insight into the inner workings of Rails that some of the excellent blogs on the subject might and given a limited budget I would probably opt for Rails Recipes over this book, alternatively purchasing the cheaper PDF ebook version of this title is certainly worthwhile.