Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition

• #6 in Best Ruby Books

26 Reviews

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Summary: Great book after you've learned the basics of RoR.

I'm writing this review because I disagree strongly with some of the previously submitted reviews that rated this book poorly.

This IS the book I'd HIGHLY recommend to anyone with a programming background who has gone through intro-level RoR books and online tutorials and wants to delve deeper into understanding the framework, in terms of gotchas, tips, recommended coding practices, etc.

When I go to a book store and pick up a book, I skim through it, look at the content, and see if the author(s) covered important or complex topics with an appropriate level of detail. This book nailed that part. Even in skimming the book for 5 minutes, I found explanations for several issues I had run into while learning RoR. E.g. with a has-one / belong-to relationship between 2 models, when does the relationship get saved if you associate the parent in the child, or associate the child to the parent? Things like that, which are relevant to programmers build real applications, are invaluable to know.

One thing that makes the book excellent is how well it explains options and their tradeoffs for implementation of functionality. E.g. there is an excellent writeup on the options for managing session data.

I've found "Simply Rails 2" to be a much better book. You can find the first few chapters online.

This book teaches you by means of building an application. It tells you how to build it and VERY briefly explains what you're doing. You spend more time building the application than understanding concepts. I can't learn that way.

ALSO it NEVER explained how to use your computers commands (for OSX, the Terminal app). Didn't explain any of it. It took me about 15 hours to get through the first phases of the app, which the author keeps ranting how easy it was and how it only took him 15 minutes..

I've made it through most of this book and while it has some good coding examples it lacks thorough explanations. If you've got a solid background in development and have done a little research on Rails you'll pick up the content without too much suffering. I've been developing Java for 3 years with little to no web experience and I feel like I could struggle through my own project at this point, but there are better books out there.

I would suggest starting with Rails Foundations 2 and moving to this book later. The Foundations author does a superb job of explaining the rails framework, ActiveRecord, views, and controllers in the 1st 7 chapters before jumping into building an application. Overall that book and Simply Rails 2 strike a better balance between application development and instruction.

I don't remember earlier versions of this book getting slammed quite like this one. Maybe it's simply because there's more competition around. Regardless, I still think this is "the" Rails book to get if you're just starting out, or want a refresher on some of the main areas of Rails.
It's gotta be hard to put out a book against such a fast-moving target, and to their credit I think they did a pretty good job - for example, they were able to sneak in a description about named scopes.
My main gripe is that REST has been adopted by the Rails community for quite some time, and I think the tutorial should have been rewritten to reflect this, i.e. it could have done wihout the "add_to_cart", "who_bought", etc. actions in the controllers.

I had almost zero background in Web Applications (I work in embedded systems programming). Few days back I gave a shot to understanding the .Net framework, however it was just too much coding for a starter like me. Someone told me about Ruby on Rails, and I thought to give it a shot. This was the first book that I came across. However it was a total disappointment.

It seemed to me that the author was more interested in getting a website running as soon as possible. Even so that the most crucial explanations were not explained properly. Though i could follow the instructions easily, the explanation of the MVC architecture was not good.

Simply Rails 2, on the other hand proved to be a much better bet for a beginner like me. The concepts are very well explained. The example website is also a little more advanced (clone of digg.com) which helps a lot in understanding more complex applications.

the feel i get from the pragmatic guide on Rails is: do this and do that. It gives you a lot of fragments of knowledge, without a very complete big picture, and without a complete explanation of what's going on. I tend to learn from the big picture and then going down to the details, and understand why in each step, so this book is not for me.

I bought this book because it's the textbook for my Ruby on Rails class. It is absolutely the worst book I have ever had to use! Rails is heavily dependent on convention, and this book doesn't discuss those conventions in any sensible manner, it only hints at them in a particular usage which is often misleading. What could they have been thinking? Bottom line, these guys don't have the first idea of how to teach and their conviction of their own superiority bleeds through their prose, which very off putting. If you already know BOTH ruby and rails, this may be a good reference. If you're looking to learn, pick another book.

I can't really figure out whether Dave Thomas is responsible for fostering more bad habits that result in horrible monkey-see-monkey-do software than Aaron Hillegass or not, but with this third edition, I can figure out that the whole cowboy hat headshot thing needs to stop immediately. It's really just pathetic.

This book is a good place to start if you want to learn how to implement a really basic shopping cart system that probably won't work in Rails (it doesn't work because the authors "wanted to illustrate the problems" -pg 114). If you want to do anything else, including use a current version of the framework, buy "The Rails Way" and "Enterprise Rails" instead, and keep to the online documentation. The whole "agile" notion is great and all, but the way Thomas plays it up as an excuse to avoid any notion of thoughtful design is a very sad cop-out from a very sad man who hasn't really written too many useful Rails applications that I've seen. Those who can't do, get publishing deals.

Originally, I meant to use this book to learn Rails. For some reason though, I could not quite get through the material - I think that the example application (the famous depot code ) was not something I particular care for at the time, so I ended up using the Learning Rails book from O'Reilly to start learning how to build Rails apps. Then I went and did something for a while.

When I got back into Rails, I again went to the Learning Rails book and started to build a web app, however, I felt like I should be able to do more with the app I built, so I started to search around various Rails web sites, as well as the Rails API documentation; at some point, I started to refer to the Agile book again. That is when I started to understand why its so popular.

Details on Active Record / Views? Check.
Pagination? Check.
Time Zones? Check.

In fact, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time on research if I have just look up the details I wanted to know in the book. That, I believe, is the strength of this book - not only it will give you the basics of building Rails, but it will go into depth as to WHY and HOW Rails works.

Not to say that Learning Rails book is bad - I think I did better with the Learning Rails through that book and I recommend that publication to anyone getting into Rails. At the same time, if you want to get beyond the basics, you will save yourself a lot of time on research by just going through the Agile book. If nothing else, get both books.

I purchased the ebook of this title a ways back and used the "beta" of the book extensively while working at a web software company. Everything worked well for me and the information was timely and accurate.

The style of the first third or so of the book may or may not work for you - it's a tutorial where you keep doing more but don't get a lot of explanation about what is going on under the hood until quite a bit later. Honestly, I didn't like it that much. It did provide useful examples of working code, however, so even if the style wasn't what I was hoping for, it did serve its purpose.

The reference portion of the book was great and contained a lot of useful explanations that you won't get by just looking at the API. If you know Rails really well already, the 3rd edition of this book might not be necessary, but if you're in the intermediate range, this is a great thing to have.

This is the first book you should follow if you plan to get into Rails development. I know many people who have tried to learn Rails. Many that were successful began by running through the tutorial in this book, many that we're unsuccessful or didn't get it, didn't follow this book. Don't just read it, do the work, run the code and build the sample application.

Then, as you are building your own application, the additional depth provided by the reference chapters at the back are excellent. They are the must/read reference section of the book. Combining this with The Pickaxe and you are on your way to becoming a good Rails developer. At which point, please contact me so that I can offer you a job.


The only downside to owning this book is that Rails moves quickly, and covering 2.2 leaves out many 2.3 features. As a mitigation, Sam Ruby has a test suite for the code in the book that ensures it all runs with the latest version of rails, or at least the failures are noted and demarcated. One should consider purchasing the digital version of this book from [...] where you can get the PDF bundled or separately, as it is updated from time to time.

This is absolutely one of the best books for an introduction to RoR. I have primarily been a C++ programmer for a while who is generally suspicious of many and most things related to web development. About six months back I decided to broaden my horizons a little bit and started reading this book.

I was pleasantly surprised by the book organization which illustrated very well the concepts of Convention over Configuration(CoC) so inherent to rails. It provided a fast introduction to Ruby programming language and in no time I had a near professional demo web application working for me.

Reading this book has been an interesting experience. Something I hope will be useful in my professional life. Keep up the good work !!

I bought this book and hope I can have some concrete examples for learning RoR, it did not disappoint me. I am using a little newer version of Ruby on Rails -- version 2.3.8 and I wasable to go through all the exercises in Chapter II, really amazing. Highly recommend it.

I picked up this book after reading a different Rails book. The other book was okay, but left me with a lot of questions. That is not the case with this book.

The first section of the book is real basic while you build an e-commerce application. The second half of the book shines. It goes into great detail about the framework, and how all the different aspects of Rails tie together.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking into Rails. Newbie or intermediate.

After spending a month reading tutorials online including some well known video tutorials I almost gave up rails until I found this book. It is true that I've acquired some knowledge from my previous attempts to understand Rails but at the same time I realized that this book is easier to grasp and it would have saved me many headaches and many moments of insanity. There are many good books out there, (most of them outdated). This one is a must have! This publication is also backed up by online support since many of today's professionals have originally learned from previous versions of this book and many have posted blogs about it, other have even become authors themselves. I'm very pleased with it. It was money well spent.

Bought this to learn Rails with no prior Rails understanding to speak of.
I've decided to purchase the book after trying to get up and running using just web-available resources. There's no comparison how fast you can learn rails with this book vs. how long it will take you if you insist using only online tutorials or other online material.

The book starts with a simple (but not TOO simple :) shopping cart and web based e-store example which lets you get and application up and running on your computer in a couple of hours or so. It then delves into details, improvements and modifications to the example.

I've used the book continuously for a couple of weeks to get to know the fundamentals and then moved on to a more heavy development, but I still find myself returning to it quite often to get better understanding of some Rails details from time to time.

Although the book isn't organized as a reference book, I think at the moment, it's the best choice available. (I've seen better references to OTHER computer languages and software systems, but not for Rails)

This book is very good, and dives deeper than some other Ruby books I've used. I don't think it's a good book as your first Ruby book or even your first Rails book. I think it would be good to start with a bit of Ruby language and an entry level Rails book and then augment with this one.

This book seems well edited and the website is helpful with addendum for the latest Rails versions and the "homework" activities.

There's not really too much to say other than this is the book to buy. Lots of great examples, written in an accessible format, and no steep learning curves like you see in a lot of programming books.
Plus, this is the book endorsed by the people behind Rails.

This easy-to-read tome is everything, and more, I expected. No technical jargon to wade through; just simple, understandable guidance for learning how to build web applications using Ruby on Rails. I highly recommend this book to anyone seriously interested in learning this fun and amazing development platform!

It's a good text, but it might be recommended that an Agile Development specific book be read, either beforehand or concurrently, while evolving the knowledge imparted in these pages. "The Art of Agile Development" by James Shore is a good compliment to this reading. Agile of course, does not only apply to Ruby and Rails, but Ruby and Rails are uniquely fashioned to promote Agile techniques. Prior Rails books do not illuminate this connection so well as this one does, if at all. As such, it can be more highly recommended to learn rails via this book as it exposes this connection through-out. As a context sensitive framework, rails can be learned to the degree of exposing just that much, or ... one might learn how to use rails in an fully iterative and collaborative development environment. That statement should clarify the import of this book. One might claim that there is a right way to learn Rails and well then too, the old way. Learn it the right way, using Agile Development practices. One quickly notes that Agile is not just a management tool, but a programmer's development methodology. In fact it transcends many development functions, from product management to testing, final release and continued maintenance and support. Rails as a framework, is enhanced by an understanding of how it fits with Agile. This book goes miles toward making that clear.

I read this book in bits and pieces over the past 6 months, in between nights of writing code and spending time with my 8 month old. I have been developing apps in Rails for about 2 years now, but definitely knew that my on-the-job-training left me with a lot of gaps in my understanding of how things really worked behind the scenes in my Rails apps. Coming from a PHP background, I have to say that it has been a wonderful experience to work with the elegant, simple, yet powerful MVC stack that is Rails, and I have also become a big fan of the Ruby language.

I have worked professionally in the software field for over 10 years now, so I came into this book with a decent understanding of objects, databases, MVC, etc. As the review title suggests, I think anybody with a programming background is going to enjoy this book. It really provides a clean, easy to digest analysis of the internals of Rails and how to do everything from auto-building the initial framework of your app to creating a RESTful API with XML and scaling to handle larger loads via caching, server configurations and other techniques. The book starts out with a real world example of building a simple shopping cart app and an admin tool to manage it. I have always preferred learning by jumping in and getting your hands dirty, and I think the book does a great job or walking you through this process. I am fairly sure you can even get all the code for this sample app from the publisher's web site, if you want to tweak or customize it further.

Following the sample shopping cart app, the book iterates through all the other major components of Rails including ActionView, ActionMailer, ActiveRecord, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and more. My one (minor) complaint here is that different authors wrote different chapters here, and they all have different styles. Some of them tend to assume more than others about what you will understand without further explanation, so the amount of detail they each go into can vary. That said, you can always read up on the individual components on the web if you want to understand more about how they work.

So if you have some programming experience, I would highly recommend this book as a great introduction to Rails, or as a means of continuing education if you are already working with Rails but want to fully understand all of its components. For total newbies, I would check out Simply Rails 2.

Of course now that Rails 3 has been released, you could argue that both books will quickly become irrelevant until updated versions are released ;-)

This is THE Rails book to own for both a primer and a reference book combined.

Very nice and easy to read book. Lots of examples and a complete e-shop solution inside.

i have a cs degree and a good deal of dev experience, but zero web dev experience. as with others, i think beginning with the development of a site is a poor choice. after the first few chapters of cookbook-like example (without explanation) i skipped to the in-depth action pack stuff.

as someone else noted, it seemed it didn't capture the big picture of how all the little piece are put together, not meaning mvc but meaning what are the fundamental principles behind the framework design?

it seemed like it gave lots of little bits to memorize instead of teaching concepts to understand. i'm going to try going back to the "example" chapters now and if that fails, try the Simply Rails book.

I started programming Ruby on Rails several years ago with the first edition of this book, and recently picked up the third edition to get started with Rails 2. I found the same great introduction to rails with many of the missing pieces from the first edition covered nicely now. Parts I and II provide an easy and quick start with rails, with Parts III and IV digging in deeper. The balance of high-level vs. in-depth detail is just right for me. It doesn't waste your time re-teaching core programming concepts - you need to bring those with you. But if you are already a competent developer looking to expand into RoR, this is the right place to start.

The third updated edition of Agile Web Development with Rails is a manual no Ruby library or web programmer's development collection should be without. Rails has evolved and this book has changed to match it, still offering step-by-step discussions of all application development issues and offering tips on how to blend Ajax and other web services into Ruby's mix. Rails 2 is covered in detail in this excellent programmer's guide.