Ruby for Rails : Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers

Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (Pragmatic Programmers)

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition

Programming

Rails Recipes (Pragmatic Programmers)

Format: Paperback
Author: Chad Fowler
ReleaseDate: 01 June, 2006
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Rating:

A top-notch title, but /please/ give us more testing recipes!
As a result, I'm quite happy to have Chad Fowler's "Rails Recipes" by my side. I am a novice Rails programmer, that much is certain. 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.

A real page turner
By their nature they are difficult to just sit down a read and as such I find them sort of tough to review. Receipt books are a different breed. 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.

Useful recipes
Its recipes are useful since they implement solutions to problems commonly faced in web applications (testing, authentication, etc. Once you've dabbled a bit with Rails, this book quickly becomes a useful tome to have on your desk.). 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.