Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers)

• #20 in Best Ruby Books

14 Reviews

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Since I learned of Ruby and Rails I instantly became a fan and supporter of them.
I bought both, the hard copy for when it releases, and electronic access to on-going work on the book.
(like having access to the writer's desk)
Every chapter, every line, are clear instructions on how to implement a feature you'll surely need to.
This book can save you many 'figuring out' hours by letting you know how to do it right the first time.
It's just an amazing hands-on reference on the Rails framework.

The basics are great - if you were back in 2007 or so.
Now in late 2008 and early 2009 the book is too obsolete. Most examples, starting almost from the first page, will not run under Rails 2.x, as the book was written with Rails 1.x in mind.
Rails is a fast advancing technology, which makes some books quickly become obsolete. This is one of them.
In short don't waste your money, and try instead something like Advanced Rails Recipes, which I just purchased, and which was written specifically for Rails 2.x

Receipt books are a different breed. By their nature they are difficult to just sit down a read and as such I find them sort of tough to review. Some years back I got into baking bread. All my receipts came out of James Beard's "Beard on Bread". I love the book, but I must say there are many parts of the book I have never looked at and others with lots of flour between the pages. The nature of a receipt book is you need to make something, you look it up, make what you need, and put the book away. Not this book.

Chad Fowler's book is something quite different. Fowler has a very comfortable and engaging writing style. In this way his book is more like a nice collection of short stories. I found myself reading one receipt after another, even if I knew I had no intention of using it anytime soon. When I did find myself trying out receipts, I found them thoughtfully organized and very easy to follow.

In recent years I've shyed away from programming receipt books, since I have found many to be really dry reading, or filled with lots of esoteric receipts I have no intention of implementing or interest in even trying as an exercise. I'm pleased I gave this receipt book and chance since it's a breed apart.

Does it have everything I'd like to see in it? No. Does it have some things I will probably never use? Yes, but surprisingly few, and who knows, these receipts seem so practical that I would not be surprised if some day I really did find that I have used most of them. I recommend this book to anyone who is serious about improving their Rails skills.

I am a novice Rails programmer, that much is certain. As a result, I'm quite happy to have Chad Fowler's "Rails Recipes" by my side. I have been part of the beta program for this book, so I've been reading it in parts for the past few months. It has been impressive, to say the least. As an author of my own "recipes" book, I am interested to see other authors' version of the recipe format, just in case I am able to incorporate something they do into a future book of my own. While Rails Recipes hasn't taught me much about writing a recipes book, it has taught me an awful lot of great things about Rails.

I look forward to using Chad's recipes in my current projects. I already have a couple of ideas, including prettying up my URLs and creating a custom form builder. If I had one criticism, it's the relative paucity of testing recipes. Writing Rails applications test-first is still a struggle for me, and I know there are those from whom I can learn. I would like the opportunity. (How many of you would like to come to Toronto to teach me?) I suppose I'll have to write a few testing recipes of my own.

Visuals:
Nothing terribly exciting visually. Use a "web / recipe card" looking tab design for sections & headings. Type face and size is standard and readable.

Readability:
Generally not a cover to cover type book. The book consists of 70 sections, some larger "recipes" and some shorter "snack recipes". The majority of the recipes include: Problem, Ingredients (gems, etc..) and Solution. These short standalone sections provide for easy reading.

Practicality:
[...]If you find a few topics that sound applicable to your current project, or that sound useful for a future project - I'm sure you will find this book to be very practical. If it saves you half an hour of searching the Internet, I imagine it probably was worth the investment.

For example, I found the topic of "Versioning Your Models" to be of real practical use. The information was presented clearly and I could immediately put it into use on a current project.

If you already know how to solve all these problems, or just are not interested in them, well then this book won't be very practical for you.

Audience:
According to the book the target audience are developers already familiar with the basics of Rails, looking to see how an experienced Rails developer would solve a specific problem. The book successfully meets that intended target.

Overall:
It is a usefull tool for a working Rails developer. Most topics are not terribly complex, but may help to make you aware of solutions that you had not previously considered. Personally, it won't be a "keep on your desk" or "use every day" type book - but I am glad to have it on my bookshelf.

'Rails Recipes' by Chad Fowler is a wonderful book filled with 70 recipes which will automatically improve your Rails skillset and no doubt get you programming faster and better than ever before!!

Pragmatic is never going to win any awards for layout of their books, but the content within more than makes up for the drab interior. I can't list out all 70 tidbits here but I will give the breakdown of chapters:

User Interface Recipes (13)

Database Recipes (17)

Controller Recipes (10)

Testing Recipes (4)

Big-Picture Recipes (22)

Email Recipes (4)

If you use Ruby on Rails and want to be able to accomplish common tasks without rewriting code that already exists, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book and improve your efficiency the moment you turn the front cover over. Wonderful book, great size, solid writing make this an EASY recommendation.

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Once you've dabbled a bit with Rails, this book quickly becomes a useful tome to have on your desk. Its recipes are useful since they implement solutions to problems commonly faced in web applications (testing, authentication, etc.). The only (minor) thing I disklike about this book is the relative crudeness of the layout and the awful page numbering (all one-page-long recipes are not page-numbered).

Highly recommended if you write Rails applications.

This is one of the best books I have come across for really giving me insight into how easy it is to do some things using Ruby on Rails that seemed massively complicated to do in other web frameworks and languages (Java, etc.) I guess the downside is that it is really hard to keep a book like this up to date, so I am expecting a sequel to come out at some point!

There are tons of useful recipes in this book. It is a must purchase if you are new or intermediate to rails.

Rails Recipes is a great way to get accustomed to Rails-specific idioms and to incorporate many of the basic features used in dynamic web applications today. Unfortunately, much has changed in Rails since its printing. Many of the recipes are outdated. For its time, though, it was the best all-in-one collection of Rails tips. From what I understand there's a new version coming, but I don't know for sure.

The Pragmatic books are generally good, but I've come to prefer the Addison Wesley series on Rails and Ruby, which are thorough and up to date.

As someone who learns best by example and seeing how it's done, this book was great for me to get familiar with Rails. I have lots of experience with other object-oriented languages and have used many development frameworks. I don't need a tutorial on general object technologies, but I wanted to learn and understand the Rails framework. I don't have any real reason to get to know Rails other than general interest, but with this book I've been able to be productive in working on hobby projects much quicker than without it.

Reading this book is like having access to multiple, experienced Rails developers (including some of those contributing to the core Rails product) that have developed and deployed commercial software on this new, upcoming platform. I hope to have an opportunity to develop product in this technology and know that by owning this product I'm more prepared than ever. Highly recommended.

Look no further .... I would also recommend trying Advanced Rails Recipe which comes out in August '07....

This is an excellent book for people who already work with Rails. You don't need to reinvent the wheel ! You just need to take a look at this recipes and you'll find solutions for a lot of your daily problems.

I would give this book 5 stars, but I only give it 4 stars because there are some minor quirks in getting some recipes to work, possibly due to differences between rails/ruby at the time of publication and the state rails is in now?

Anyway, it's minor things you can work your way through, but which nevertheless show the book's age.