Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy

I haven't finished the book yet, but I'm really impressed so far. Please keep in mind that it's not a perfect or comprehensive book, but it serves its purpose very well. Many programming books suffer from wanting to cover everything comprehensively. This is a little tiresome when you just want to get going. The reason I like Rails Solutions so much is that even if you don't understand all (or even most) of the code that you're typing in, your program rapidly progresses - and you'll pick up the syntax and structure over time. It's like learning a foreign language - who wants to be going through all the variants of conjugations when it's a lot faster to just dive right in and start speaking. You'll make lots of mistakes, but you'll get to where you want to be a lot faster. I fully expect that I'll reference other Ruby and Rails books to supplement this book - but as a way to give myself a nice frame in terms of (very broadly) how Ruby on Rails works (and to get excited about its possibilities) - this is an excellent book.

This book is the perfect combination between treating you like a dummy while at the same providing you with practical and useful techniques and info. Many programming books seem to be at one extreme or the other. Either its a massive reference book that you can use as a weapon against dinosaurs or else it's "how-to" that doesn't really tell you how to do anything interesting. "Rails Solutions" is a short book (you get through it in a few days) that provides step-by-step guides to the basics (e.g. installing rails, running the server, etc) as well as easy to understand guides to accomplish more complex and cool stuff (e.g. using ajax and so on). Great book. I would recommend it to anyone looking to get started with ruby on rails.

To call Justin's book "useless" (as some joker before me has) is silly and does a disservice to Rails Solutions. I got a ton of very good, very practical info out of the book, some of which -- such as the Capistrano and deployment stuff -- I'd never come across in such a lucid manner. Is it a beginner's book? Yeah, it is, and it's aimed squarely at designers and front-end developers who are generally uncomfortable w/ dynamic stuff and code, and in that respect it totally suceeds. Cross this book with the classic Agile one and throw in an O'Reilly book or two (Bruce Tate's slim one, maybe, or Ajax on Rails) and you'll be golden.

Rails Solutions by Justin Williams was an excellent primer to the popular framework, Ruby on Rails. I recently had a chance to learn some basics of the RoR framework from a friend of mine, Stephen Rainey. He got me up and running and pointed me to some great resources and books. This book is a recent release from Friends of Ed and it is highly recommended if you are just getting your feet wet with Rails. The book walks you through each step to get up and running and developing the `Railslist' application. The author takes the time to walk through the installation process for both OS X and Windows. The flow of the book was very easy to read and each chapter built more from the previous chapters. The goal of the book was to create a working rails application, while showing you the possible routes and benefits. The overall flow looked a bit like this: The first chapters were very elementary. This is a good thing for those looking to learn the right way to get started. The author walks you through Ruby, the language behind Rails, and shows you some of the constructs and nuances of the language. This is a good primer for those coming from another language (such as PHP) that looks very different. After the introduction to the language, he moved forward into the setup. Installing Rails was painless. The author walks through the necessary steps to setup a development environment on the Mac and Windows platform. For those who are interested in some additional resources on setting up your environment, check out the updated Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X by Dan Benjamin. Personally, I have found using Mac Ports a very easy way to manage your development environment and it is worth a good look. We are now ready to build our application! Through the next few chapters, the author walks you through creating a `railslist' application. With each chapter you learn new aspects of rails. You learn how to setup your project, how to use scaffolding, how to generate your models, views, and controllers, and how to get your database connected and working. He goes in depth on each aspect. Setting up relationships and validations in your model (ActiveRecord), setting up your Controllers and using custom routing, and then how to get your views in place and use partials and .rjs files. Towards the end, we even get to add a dash of Ajax to the application for some simple tasks. The last chapters and appendices discuss deployment of your application to a production server and all the pieces that need to be in place to go live to the public and handle the traffic. Though this book covered the steps, I have heard that there is more to be said on deploying your application - so you may want to look at some more resources. This book is for a beginner to Rails. If you are an advanced programmer or have been in Rails for a while now - then this book is not for you (and the author states this in the first paragraph of the book). I felt that ther

Great book for a Ruby beginner, easy to read, great examples--definitely recommended for anyone interested in this to buy to get started or brush up on their skills