Rails Crash Course: A No-Nonsense Guide to Rails Development 1st Edition

I found RCC at the library, got about 34 pages in and wanted one.

Before I submit my review for this book, let me preface by pointing out I am not now, nor I have ever been, a Ruby/Rails developer. But I am an experienced software engineer and wanted to learn something about Rails development, hence my desire to use the book and subsequently review it for O'Reilly. So my approach to the book is as a novice Rails guy.Rails Crash Course by Anthony Lewis seemed to provide relatively good coverage of Ruby and Rails from what I can tell, with lots of practical code samples.Note: What you won't find here is very good advice on how to install and configure Ruby and Rails for your given environment. Trust me when I say that's half the battle. Hence, my suggestion right off is you do some research ahead of time for how to install and configure for your system. I recommend the site https://gorails.com and failing that, check out the Rails Forum.Back to the book, chapter two covers fundamentals of the Ruby language in brief, then moves to the concept of Rails development. There is a discussion of MVC in the Rails development philosophy, the principles behind using Rails, and a basic overview of Rails structure and commands.The book then gets into more detail, covering each aspect of the models, controllers, and views development, respectively, and wraps up with deployment via the Heroku cloud platform. This is where is gets really heady, and where you quickly discover that in fact NO, Windows is definitely not the best platform for RoR dev. In fact, I highly encourage not to use Windows to follow this text. You're better off with using a sim like VirtualBox against some other OS (I used Ubuntu 14.n). Mac OS X is considered ideal, but I highly suggest not to follow the Ubuntu setup discussed in Chapter 15. There are easier ways.The author then tackles testing, performance optimization, debugging, and custom deployment scenarios. All in all, the book is definitely a crash course and not for the feint of heart. This is not a beginner's book; No Starch is known for its books that make lots of assumptions about their audience. They expect experience and I recommend you have quite a bit of development time before you go through this endeavor.That said, I found the text to be competently written and with few notations as errata. In some cases, things just didn't work but I don't necessarily blame the book. I'm still troubleshooting. The big con here was I found some of the topics a little disjointed, and I think only 10 pages devoted to debugging a little too lean. At the end, I considered the text practical but a bit mediocre at points.Disclaimer: In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. My opinions about the book are my own and based on my many years of experience as a professional software engineer and web developer.

Rails Crash Course has some great, to the point, practical advice on building applications with Rails. But I feel quite a bit of it is poorly organized which it didn't have to be.The book is in two parts - the first 6 chapters cover the basic of the Ruby language and the Rails platform. The remaining 9 or 10 chapters go further in depth. The book is somewhat tersely written and doesn't do spoon feeding. The good part is that this keeps the book concise. The bad part if, you really want to call it that, is that you have to read it twice - both times with deliberation, to start making sense of some of the parts. In addition, in some chapters the author digresses to cover some prerequisite material before resuming focus on the core topic of the chapter. However, in many cases the rationale for these digressions are not clearly explained and you have to read on to figure out why such random jumps are needed. This is symptomatic of a poorly (perhaps hastily) organized book - great content but one that could be presented much better than it is.In spite of that, the amount of content that this book condenses to just under 300 pages is considerable. So the book has enough to offer to the patient and smart reader. Hence I'll go with a 4 star.

I got a free review copy from NoStarch. I followed the instructions for Windows in the book, and during the chapter 1 intro to basic Ruby functionality with irb, everything was great. Then I got into chapter 2 and things fell apart.First the "rails new blog" command failed because it thought I hadn't installed the devkit. Apparently there are post-install scripts it needs to add itself to the path, but the instructions to run those were left out of the book's Windows install instructions. Updated the path, ran the "rails new blog" and it seemed to work fine.Then I tried to launch the server. Got errors related to not having a timezone source. Googled it, installed the tzinfo-data gem, but it didn't fix it.Saw a line on the next page where it says "You didn't have to configure anything to get a basic Rails application up and running." Really sort of pissed me off. I'm currently in config hell, prevented from continuing, and I followed the instructions as provided.UPDATEFound a tutorial on YouTube (Johnathan McDonald's "Rails on Windows, June 2014") and got both Ruby and Rails installed.According to the book, the entirety of installing the DevKit is: "double-click the DevKit file and follow the prompts to install the Development Kit."The DevKit file is a self-extracting archive. The only prompts are to ask you where you want it extracted. The actual installation... couple of really important steps, left out of the book entirely.The rest of the entire book depends on the install instructions and no one play tested them??? And when I find that something so crucial was glossed over by the author and the tech editors, it makes the rest of the book suspect. I'd review the rest, but after such a glaring error, I'm not really interested in reading on to discover what they'll leave out or get wrong next.

This is succinct and covers a lot of ground. Very thorough treatment. I have read a lot of books on Rails and this comes close to being perfect.

If you are new to Ruby on Rails, this is the place to start. Save the other books until after you've gone through this one.

Reasons I like this book:* As I work through the book on my computer, everything matches what is going on in the book* The book moves along at a good pace, and the writing style is easy-to-read* There are exercises at the end of each chapter, with answers at the end of the book.* I like the way the book is organized. The initial chapters build a blog application, and later a social application like Twitter is built. The initial application is sufficient for the beginning concepts, and the latter application is appropriate for the more advanced concepts.* There is also chapters on git and using testing (including mention of tdd). I like that these are covered by separate chapters, and not mentioned throughout the entire book repeatedly. It is not meant to be a book on those topics, and I personally dislike when a book tries to do everything. As well, I thought it did a great job at concisely summarizing git and testing techniques.* I have not come across many typos - I think I noticed only one so far* I love the texture of the book's cover. The book just feels nice to hold in your hand. It's a small plus, but something that has made me smile a few times while reading.Other Ruby on Rails books that I like:* "Agile Web Development with Rails 4" - also easy-to-read, and contains alot of useful info. I focused on the 3rd section of the book.Other Ruby on Rails books that I dislike:* "Rails Tutorial" (2nd edition) by Michael Hartl.I think I read about 6 chapters of that book, but I picked up and put down the book several times before that happened. It is painful to read. The paperback version I bought did not have properly formatted ruby code (punctuation was missing, which makes me angry; I got used to it eventually). The Rails Tutorial book is so very slow moving - because it tries to tackle everything at once (i.e. ruby setup, TDD, git, rails...), by the time you get to chapter 6 you still haven't done anything interesting. It just takes forever to get anywhere, and personally I don't like his writing style.Anthony Lewis, please write some more books. I love your style!

Covers quite a lot of important concepts and good guidance through the exercises by building the foundation one concept at a time. I have the impression that I understood the syntax and the concepts behind Rails much more than other books that just lay out the syntax without a good explanation.

As a beginner I found this book tricky to use I definitely think you have to have a few beginner courses under your belt before attacking this one. I kept it and hope to revisit it again one day since it does look good.

Great book!