Agile Web Development with Rails

on Fri Jul 14 18:38:02 GMT 2006 in Books

The Raving

When I first heard about this ruby on rails thing, I admit that I dismissed it. I was happy with my PHP. It was easy, nothing new to learn. But the next time I was at the bookstore, I saw this book, and decided to pick it up and see what all the hype was about. Well, here I am a couple of months later with a site on rails and a forum on rails, both of which took only a week to code and finish.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 is basically the introduction to the book. It talks about why you should use rails (and you should) and how it works, and the general acknowledgements.

Chapters 2 to 4 or Getting Started

(A bit Rocky and Bullwinkle?)

Anyways, Chapters 2 through 12 walk you through getting an application up and running. Chapter 2 describes the architecture of rails, the folders, the models, views, controllers, everything you need to know.

Chapter 3 has installation instructions for each of the major OSs (Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux). It also talks about database interactions and how to keep up to date.

Chapter 4 talks you through how to create an actual rails application, as in the rails command, how to make your first pages and how to link them.

Chapters 5 – 12

The main part of the book teaching rails is through the authors showing how to build an application (called Depot) which will have products which you can set up to sell to others. It comes complete with adding user logging in and registration, showing models, and views, and controllers and how they interact, some validation, and most of the stuff you need to know to program your own application, including testing and how to use tests. It’s a great teaching aid, walking you from beginning to end and has a full source listing in the end of the book.

Chapters 13 to 22

The final chapters are all about the rails framework, and getting into rails.

Chapter 13 goes in depth with rails, explaning naming conventions, configuration, structure, logging, etc.

Chapters 14 and 15 go into Active Record, or the database interaction, talking about how to connect, the special columns, creating, reading, updating, deleting, relationships between tables, inheritance, validation, callbacks, and a lot more.

Chapter 16 gets into the controllers. How to route requests, how to use cookies and sessions, flash, and filters/verification, even a bit of caching.

Chapter 17 is the one I find myself referring back to the most for some reason. Chapter 17 covers so much in the views. It covers how to use Builder templates (rxml), RHTML templates, all the different formatting helpers you can use, how to link, pagination, the form helpers, layouts and components, how to use more caching, and even adding a new templating system.

Chapter 18 goes into AJAX and the different commands there. A lot of great information there about Script.aculo.us and all the DOM methods and rails calls (like observe_field or periodically_call_remote)

Chapter 19 talks about sending email. To be honest, it took a while for me to figure it out. It takes a bit of concentrating to figure out how to set the email up to work, but afterwards it’s pretty easy to send them.

Chapter 20 talks about Web Services. Again, to be honest, I never really messed with the chapter. Looks like there’s some greate information in there, but I didn’t see when I’d use it. Of course, you might use it for your products.

Chapter 21 talks about how to secure your rails application against SQL injection, cross site scripting, file uploads, more along that line.

Chapter 22 is the basics about Deployment. How to get your rails app off your computer and into the wild. (Unless of course your computer will be serving as the wild,)

Conclusion

If you’re just starting rails, I’d say definately get this book. Even if you haven’t just started rails, I’d still say to get this book. I find myself flipping through the index whenever I’m not totally sure of a function and usually I will find great documentation for it. There are just a few things the book doesn’t totally cover, but it’s enough. I’m sure that the next version will be even better than this when it comes out in another couple of months.