Reviews for Ruby on Rails Bible

1. Could have been better had it been passed through an editor

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

   Firstly, an admission: I'm only half way through this book. Whilst it has the potential to be an excellent aide to writing decent Ruby on Rails code, I'm surprised that this book has as many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors as it does. It feels like it hasn't seen a decent proof reader and has a feeling that it has been rushed to the store.
   Having previously read the Agile Web Development with Rails book I was really pleased with the way it had been written. However, being a relative newbie to RoR (bot not other programming languages) I felt there was something missing. I truly believe that Ruby on Rails Bible has the potential to fill all those important gaps for newbies which AWDWR glosses over. I would certainly only read Ruby on Rails Bible having first read AWDWR.
   In trying some of the code from this book, it too is littered with mistakes and, as such, would be useless for someone new to RoR. They would possibly spend more time trying to debug the code than producing anything useful. What makes it more incredible is that the book prompts to you start up WebBrick and try the code. It advises you to go back and check your typing if the program does not work as expected. You could spend months going back and checking your code and still not gain the working code due to a fundamental failure of the book.
   Whislt all books undoubtedly have spelling, grammatical and coding errors, I feel this one exceeds that which might be viewed as acceptable.
   By the time it reaches a second edition I'm sure it'll be a worthy addition to anyone's book shelf. At the moment though I'm not impressed.
   Here's hoping the final half of the book is better than the first.
   By the way, I've given it three stars more for potential as the book has lots of clear explanations and some great detail. But I expect more for my money.