A P Rajshekhar
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By: Packt Publishing
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4
Average rating: 1.0 of 5
Outdated before it was published 2 out of 5 stars.
9 of 10 people found this review helpful.
I have just cracked this book open and started skimming it. It looks like it might be a pretty good resource for Rails 1.2.6.
But version 2.0 of Rails was released four months before this book's publication date, and announced long before that. I'm very surprised that this book wasn't based on that current version. There are significant differences between Rails 1.2.6 and 2.0.
Most potential readers of this book should get one that covers Rails 2.0 instead.
Steer clear! 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.
Massive interest in Ruby on Rails over the past few years was quickly mirrored in book sales. Early entrants like the (near definitive) Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails were break away hits in a world that usually sees modest sales of each title. It's not surprising a lot of people wanted to get a share of that market, and the range of Ruby and Rails titles has exploded, with an unsurprising dip in average quality.
This latest title from Packt sits somewhere very low down the quality scale. An unfocussed volume, it purports to introduce the ruby language and show how to get up and running with a simple buzzword-laden Rails application, but does a distinctly inadequate job on both counts. Any moderately experienced rubyist would worry at seeing code like:
class Tale
@author
@genre
@tale_body
end
recommended as the way to define a class with three attributes, rather than the more succinct, idiomatic and functional:
class Tale
attr_accessor :author, :genre, :tale_body
end
(For those unfamiliar with ruby, the former will define attributes but not accessors for them. The latter will define the attributes and its accessors and is the recommended approach for public attributes)
That example occurs early on, and as the book progresses it is hard to shake the sense that the author isn't sufficiently familiar with the idioms and best practices of the Ruby and Rails communities to be introducing either the language or the framework. When working with a framework as dependent on conventions and opinions as Rails, a failure to grasp the idioms is a serious problem.
It would be hard to recommend this book even if there weren't many superior titles available. Newcomers to Ruby and/or Rails would be far better with any of several alternatives. Beyond that, while packt have published a number of excellent titles, the publication of this book should be taken as a reminder that there is no consistent quality control over the books they publish and buyers should research carefully before buying one.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.
Editorial Review:
Learn to create dynamic websites with Ruby on Rails. This book is for anyone who has basic concepts of object-oriented programming as well as relational databases and wants to develop online applications using Ruby on Rails. Prior knowledge of Ruby or Rails is not expected.
