Great intro and approach

The book takes a two-part approach to describing RoR. In the first 8 real chapters (5-12), the Daves use a gradual build-up a storefront application with incremental and increasingly complex functionality to show RoR's capabilities and flexibility. Walking through these helps you get some hands-on experience with the framework. The next 10 chapters go through the various aspects of the Rails framework and describes how RoR does its thing. Besides the core functionality, the book also covers Security, Caching and performance, and testing.

A good framework lets you do the most common things easily (do simple things simply!), while also letting you override the default behavior to implement your own logic. I appreciated this book's approach in following this flow, first showing you how to do simple things, and then explaining how to bypass or override parts of the framework's assumed formalisms.

I bought this book in tandem with the Programming Ruby book, having been away from programming for many years and not knowing Ruby at all. I would recommend that you at least get acquainted with Ruby first, but after that, it's an easy read. I developed my first basic AJAX app using RoR in little time, mainly using the book but sometimes needing to go to the web for more info.

I haven't read any other books on Ruby, but for an introduction to RoR, this one is very good.

Other Reviews

• Great Book-for all skill levels
• Great intro and approach
• Not dry like your typical programming book
• is the perfect way to start playing with RoR