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Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails
At just over 500 pages, Dave Thomas' new book manages to cover a lot of ground in a concise, readable manner. One problem at the outset -- the book is not finished. Knowing that the Ruby on Rails community has been chomping at the bit for morsels of information, Dave and David (DHH) have answered the call by releasing the forthcoming book early. "The book has not had a full technical edit, so it will contain errors. It has not been copy edited, so it will be full of typos. And there's been no effort spent doing layout, so you'll find bad page breaks, over-long lines, incorrect hyphenations, and all the other ugly things that you wouldn't expect to see in a finished book. We can't be held liable if you follow our instructions, expecting to create a Rails application, and you end up with a strange shaped farm implement instead. Despite all this, we think you'll enjoy it!"
And enjoy it I did. The "Getting Started" section of AWDRoR provides a whirlwind overview of the Ruby on Rails' architecture. I found Rails to be very intimidating at first. You can't just cut-and-paste a couple lines of code like you can in PHP. Rails generates all kinds of directories and files, making it feel like your first trip to Disneyland -- you know there's fun to be had, but it's a big place and you don't know your way around. The reason for all this is because, in programming, short simple scripts are easy and simple, full blown Web applications are not. Many LAMP projects developing in perl/Python/PHP and any number of templating engines have started simple, but grown into unruly messes that are difficult to maintain. While trying to grok Ruby on Rails, topics like Model-View-Control and Object-Relational Mapping really don't stick at first. Add to the confusion that many of us are also struggling to learn Ruby and a RDBMS (such as MySQL; Rails works with others databases as well). The overview of Rails is necessary, but I found it to be a lot more helpful rereading it after completing the tutorial section. So if you read through this first section and feel lost like I was, just know that the material will become familiar to you and press on, because it gets a whole lot easier from here on in.
I really enjoyed the Tutorial section, a narrative designing a shopping cart application for a customer. Dave says it best: "Does the world need another shopping cart application? Nope, but that hasn't stopped hundreds of developers from writing one. Why should we be different? More seriously, it turns out that our shopping cart will illustrate many of the features of Rails development. We'll see how to create simple maintenance pages, link database tables, handle sessions, and create forms. Over the next seven chapters, we'll also touch on peripheral topics such as unit testing, security, and making our pages look nice."
Dave begins not with lofty design plans, but with a tool most real programmers use: napkin drawings. Many of us sit down over coffee with a customer and talk about what they need, sketching out ideas with paper and pencil, not some complex software planning tool. Each chapter in the tutorial section allows a story to unfold, where the customer works alongside the developer. Real life situations like changing direction or refactoring code are covered as each programming session is done. You really see why Rails is becoming so popular. It wasn't written by a team of programmers trying to hammer out an arbitrary list of features, but rather Rails was built around a real application (Basecamp). Pragmatic considerations such as developer time, feature creep, and maintenance issues have all been skillfully addressed in Rails. The tutorial reflects this, and at the same time it also gently, almost unknowingly, teaches principles as outlined in the agile manifesto. Some of the goals include:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
The third section, "Rails in Depth," dives into the inner workings of Rails. Components such as ActiveRecord, ActionController, ActiveView, and Web Services (Ajax) are all covered well. There are even chapters on securing and deploying your applications properly. These chapters, in conjunction with the API docs found on www.rubyonrails.org, give a full overview of Rails. Most helpful in this section are the notes and diagrams which help pull everything together. The appendices that cap off the book also provide the full tutorial source code, as well as a brief introduction to Ruby, the language that makes all the magic happen.
In short, Rails is a brilliant architecture, and Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is a great book. I'm reluctant to point out its shortcomings as it's still in beta, but it's really hard for me to find much to complain about. It took me some time for the light to come on with Rails, but once it does, you see that Rails could not exist without Ruby, the language it's inextricably woven into. As Dave Thomas is quoted on www.rubyonrails.com, Rails is probably "the framework to break Ruby into the mainstream." Whether you believe the hype or not of "super productivity," "Ten times faster development," and "Better than anything else," Ruby on Rails is a great tool to add to your belt. In fact, I find myself using it exclusively for Web apps, and I catch myself using python and PHP less and less and Ruby more and more for my day to day programs.
If you want to learn Ruby on Rails, Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is a great choice, and will probably be the definitive book on the subject.
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I particularly enjoy their persistable domain model (where logic and data are bound in one wrapping). The one-method-per-action-controller-request-router is sweet. And there's nothing like sending out forgotten passwords and invoices from easy-to-test email service layers on top of sendmail. To dust off an old chestnut, I welcome our new buzzword-crazed overlords. It's too bad that I already have a good job as a clown.
Incorrect. If you buy the book now, you'll get the beta PDF and the book when it comes out. Likewise, if you just buy the PDF, you'll get the full PDF when it's all done. You are not just buying a beta in either case.
In short, Rails is a brilliant architecture, and Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is a great book.
I believe that not grokking MVC detracts from the value of your review, particularly with respect to your opinion of the architecture of Rails. Without understanding MVC, you can have no understanding of the design decisions they made, and as such, no qualified understanding of the architecture itself.
This was my only concern. Thanks for the review!
Could this review be more fawning, please?
The appendices that cap off the book also provide the full tutorial source code, as well as a brief introduction to Ruby, the language that makes all the magic happen.
In short, Rails is a brilliant architecture
Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails is a great choice, and will probably be the definitive book on the subject. The tutorial is probably the best I've ever read.
God. That last one sounds like Napoleon Dynamite.
A "beta" book, in PDF form, with typographical and technical errors, will probably be the "definitive book" about a brand-new framework? What a statement...
Don't get me wrong - I haven't had much time to play with Rails, and as a web developer, I probably should, in order to keep my skills fresh. I may even like it. But this fervent, sycophantic praise - spurred on by the blogerati (flamesuit enabled) - seems premature, especially when there are many capable web application frameworks out there. In the future, it might even seem silly. After all, anyone want to admit to owning a copy of Oreilly's book about Slash?
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
I predict there will be basically two categories of posts about Rails.
Either, one, that Rails is so amazing that after you use it sex seems laughably trivial by comparison, even and especially you count the production value -- one can, after all, only have one child (on average) using sex, but with Rails, dude, I HAD TEN.
Or, two, that Rails is no big deal, it's just another MVC re-think, heck I rolled one of those myself one afternoon a coupla years back, yeah it ruled but, you know, I'm really into that Java thing now. Besides, Rails is no good for BIG projects, for that you need Hibernate and a crane.
So I'll post one for the middle-of-the-road. Rails rules. I love it. I've reimplemented, in a week-and-a-half, a fairly large application that took me two months to do with Python. It's not a fair comparison because with Python I used Webware but did everything, like user management and logging, with no starting point, and also the first time around I wasn't as familiar with the problem domain.
With Rails I used the Salted Hash Login Generator which got the basics of my user login and management done in one fell swoop, an hour or two of work. I also re-used the view code from the Python app.
But the rest of it was fun. I enjoyed it. Things were done quickly and the API is awesome. ActiveRecord is not Hibernate -- yes, Javapeople, we know, we know -- but it's good. It's really good and super easy. And while there's some magic going on behind the scenes with Rails, it's not hard to understand at all.
That said, yes, if you're an online payroll system for IBM, Rails won't cut it. There are flaws, but for day-to-day stuff, not too many. It's updated very frequently, too.
My only complaint is the ubermensch of Rails, Dave Heinemeier, who, while smart, is also all too aware of it, and frequently shoots his blog off about topics which go beyond Web frameworks and into areas of either glib tech-prejudice or, at times, more subtle see-how-smart-I-am dorkposts -- the most insufferable species of Geek.
Otherwise, I strongly encourage anyone to check Rails out. It's great and a *lot* of other frameworks in other languages could stand to pay attention to the innovations in Rails. These innovations aren't so much technical epiphanies, as they are the meeting of many good ideas in one place, along with enthusiastic support and a lot of glue. Ruby's fun, too.
Check out, also, the frameworks from other languages which are shamelessly stealing from Rails:
Subway (Python)
Catalyst (Perl)
Chr0m0Dr0m!C