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I tend to read a lot of technical books. My current passion is with the Ruby programming language and the Rails web application framework which is built on top of the Ruby language. I’m also a published technical author myself. The book that I am currently writing is the Ruby on Rails Bible which will be published by Wiley this spring. However, since that is a few months away still, I thought I’d share some reviews of some current Rails books that I find to be excellent learning and reference resources. The three books that are reviewed here are:
Two of the books RailsSpaces, and The Rails Way, are in the Professional Ruby series. Obie Fernandez, author of The Rails Way is the lead editor for that series.
This is a book that walks through the complete implementation of a social networking web application developed with the Rails framework. A hosted version of the application developed throughout this book is available online at www.railsspace.com. The authors of this book are Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka.
This book is essentially an extended tutorial that is developed throughout the book. Some of the topics touched on while developing the Rails Space application are user authentication, image uploading, geo data, email integration, Ajax, and Restful development. As the application is written, tests are also written as each component of the application is finished. This provides excellent practical material on writing tests for your own Rails applications. You’ll find many of the techniques that the authors show you for creating tests and testing various pieces of the code to be very useful in your own projects.
Overall, I found this to be probably the best book available of its type, that is a book which serves as a tutorial focusing on the development of a large sample application. I highly recommend this book to any developer getting started with Rails. Even experienced Rails developers will enjoy this book.
This book provides probably the most complete coverage of the Rails framework of any book currently out. This book is also the first book that I am aware to provide coverage of Rails 2.0. The author of this book is Obie Fernandez whom is one of the most respected Rails developers in the industry. Obie recently started his own Rails consulting firm, Hash Rocket.
The book provides excellent in-depth coverage of a wide range of technologies related to Rails development including Rails core technologies like Controllers, ActiveRecord, ActionView, the Rails routing system, Helpers, REST, Ajax, Session Management, Authentication, ActionMailer, ActiveResource, Rails Plugins and Testing. Technologies that are complementary to Rails are also covered in-depth including: testing with RSpec, Capistrano, background processing, plugins, and production configurations. The chapter on production configurations provides an excellent overview of what is necessary to get a Rails application running in a production environment. It includes example configurations for Mongrel and Nginx for serving your application and Monit for monitoring your application.
Unlike some other Rails books, this book assumes a knowledge of Ruby and does not waste pages with a long Ruby introduction. In my opinion, that is a good thing. If you are interested in learning Ruby, this book is not the best choice for you.
The book’s afterword is titled What is the Rails Way (To You)? Be sure not to skip that if you read the book. This chapter provides a collection of thoughts from a bunch of Ruby and Rails developers, quite a few of whom you will have probably heard of if you keep up with the Rails community. I found it to be a very interesting and insightful chapter.
The Rails Way is also a nominee as Best Technical Book in the Jolt Awards competition. Overall, if I could buy only one book about Rails, this would be the book.
This book takes the reader through several practical examples of web applications that showcase the features of Rails. The book provides a very practical way of extending your Rails development knowledge once you’ve mastered the basics of Rails development. The author of this book is Eldon Alameda. The applications that you will build over the course of the book are:
Like the other books I’ve included in this review, no pages are wasted on a Ruby introduction chapter. Instead this book assumes a knowledge of Ruby and jumps right into building each of the sample projects. Throughout the course of implementing these applications, you’ll use several popular Rails plugins as well as some features from popular JavaScript frameworks, YUI, and ExtJS. These JavaScript frameworks are excellent compliments to the Rails framework. The book is best read from start to finish, as in some cases each of the projects builds on functionality or features developed for an earlier project.
This book does include unit testing as well, though it does not emphasize it as much as the Rails Space book does. Some of the technologies that you’ll see in this book are: developing web services, Restful development, graphing, caching, and file upload. Some of the plugins that you’ll use throughout the course of the book include: acts_as_authenticated, calendar_helper, restful_authentication, css_graphs, ziya graphs, will_paginate, and attachment_fu.
Overall, I found this to be another excellent book that can be read from cover to cover. Both new and experienced developers will learn something from this book.
