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Rails Recipes
James Edward Gray II writes "If you have been swept up by the Rails craze or are even just a casual fan, you have probably been waiting for the terrific books to start rolling in. Some early entries, like Agile Web Development with Rails, were very solid but for me greatness arrived with Rails Recipes. For those who are not familiar with it, Rails is a full-stack web application framework, for quickly developing state-of-the-art web applications. Rails Recipes is the latest book on the subject from the Pragmatic Programmers." Read the rest of James's review.
Rails Recipes
author
Recipes
pages
299
publisher
The Pragmatic Programmers
rating
Excellent
reviewer
James Edward Gray II
ISBN
0-9776166-0-6
summary
A programming cookbook for all things Rails.
Let me tell you how I discovered Rails Recipes. At the Rails shop I work for, we needed a favorites system for our latest application. When I inherited the task of implementing favorites, I had heard just enough to guess that the new polymorphic associations feature of Rails might be just what I needed. Sadly, I had never even seen an example of their usage. Before leaving work that day, I checked the table of contents to make sure a recipe for what I needed was in there and and bought a combo pack, so the PDF would be waiting for me in the morning. The next day I built the entire favorites system and integrated it into our application with only the book as my guide. Total time for implementation, from cracking the book to a complete solution: just over three hours.
Needless to say, the book had completely won me over by that point. I started sneaking in recipe reads whenever I had a free moment or two and had literally devoured the book in no time. I completely expected it to show me cute AJAX tricks and handle common issues like login code and it certainly does these things. It also covers popular plugins, including Acts as Taggable and Acts as Versioned, as it should. What I didn't expect was for the book to include so many excellent low-flash coding recommendations as well. There are terrific recipes for DRYing up your code in various circumstances, building your own output forms for views, how to use models in migrations even if the files are long gone, integration testing as a DSL, routing methods, code generation, and a whole lot more.
The book has some surprising depth to the Rails insights it provides, not because the recipes are long but more because the topics are well chosen. Even the small "Snack Recipes" generally dive right to the heart of a commonly encountered matter. You get typical solutions and often some tips on how to customize the relevant Rails behaviors. For example, the book covers how to add inflections Rails can use in its singular/plural text transformations and how to tie your own form building classes right into the standard Rails helper methods.
I'm a long time Ruby user and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable with regard to the language, but this book taught me new tricks. I've read the Pickaxe, but for some reason IRb sessions never sunk in for me until this book showed the perfect example of using the on an ActiveRecord model to create a Ruby syntax database shell. The book even taught me some great YAML tricks for use in fixtures and configuration files.
Now I realize I've been gushing a little, so let me to balance it with at least some words of caution. First, this book assumes you know Rails. You will not learn Rails here. This should not be the first Rails book you read, though it does make an ideal second read and daily reference. I should also note that the recipe sections seem pretty arbitrary to me. I expected to find the login discussion in the "Big-Picture Recipes" section and the console tips in "Database Recipes", but they are located elsewhere. This might be a minor challenge for those who try to thumb straight to a recipe, but I've found searching the PDF makes this a non-issue. (The paper version of the book does have nice tabs drawn on the edge of pages to lead you to recipe types though, unrelated to the sections.) Finally, I should note that I've gone hunting in the book for about four work projects now, and found all but one. It didn't cover Acts as Threaded usage. Obviously it is impossible for a single book to answer all your questions about Rails, but a 75% ratio seems like a great start to me!
There are 70 recipes in this book split among user interface, database, controller, testing, big-picture, and email categories. I must stress again though how well these recipes pack in the tips. Don't be at all surprised if you learn an applicable view layer or even pure Ruby trick in a database recipe.
If you are a Rails user, I must recommend you pick up this title immediately. I really believe there is something in here for all.
You can purchase Rails Recipes from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Let me tell you how I discovered Rails Recipes. At the Rails shop I work for, we needed a favorites system for our latest application. When I inherited the task of implementing favorites, I had heard just enough to guess that the new polymorphic associations feature of Rails might be just what I needed. Sadly, I had never even seen an example of their usage. Before leaving work that day, I checked the table of contents to make sure a recipe for what I needed was in there and and bought a combo pack, so the PDF would be waiting for me in the morning. The next day I built the entire favorites system and integrated it into our application with only the book as my guide. Total time for implementation, from cracking the book to a complete solution: just over three hours.
Needless to say, the book had completely won me over by that point. I started sneaking in recipe reads whenever I had a free moment or two and had literally devoured the book in no time. I completely expected it to show me cute AJAX tricks and handle common issues like login code and it certainly does these things. It also covers popular plugins, including Acts as Taggable and Acts as Versioned, as it should. What I didn't expect was for the book to include so many excellent low-flash coding recommendations as well. There are terrific recipes for DRYing up your code in various circumstances, building your own output forms for views, how to use models in migrations even if the files are long gone, integration testing as a DSL, routing methods, code generation, and a whole lot more.
The book has some surprising depth to the Rails insights it provides, not because the recipes are long but more because the topics are well chosen. Even the small "Snack Recipes" generally dive right to the heart of a commonly encountered matter. You get typical solutions and often some tips on how to customize the relevant Rails behaviors. For example, the book covers how to add inflections Rails can use in its singular/plural text transformations and how to tie your own form building classes right into the standard Rails helper methods.
I'm a long time Ruby user and I consider myself fairly knowledgeable with regard to the language, but this book taught me new tricks. I've read the Pickaxe, but for some reason IRb sessions never sunk in for me until this book showed the perfect example of using the on an ActiveRecord model to create a Ruby syntax database shell. The book even taught me some great YAML tricks for use in fixtures and configuration files.
Now I realize I've been gushing a little, so let me to balance it with at least some words of caution. First, this book assumes you know Rails. You will not learn Rails here. This should not be the first Rails book you read, though it does make an ideal second read and daily reference. I should also note that the recipe sections seem pretty arbitrary to me. I expected to find the login discussion in the "Big-Picture Recipes" section and the console tips in "Database Recipes", but they are located elsewhere. This might be a minor challenge for those who try to thumb straight to a recipe, but I've found searching the PDF makes this a non-issue. (The paper version of the book does have nice tabs drawn on the edge of pages to lead you to recipe types though, unrelated to the sections.) Finally, I should note that I've gone hunting in the book for about four work projects now, and found all but one. It didn't cover Acts as Threaded usage. Obviously it is impossible for a single book to answer all your questions about Rails, but a 75% ratio seems like a great start to me!
There are 70 recipes in this book split among user interface, database, controller, testing, big-picture, and email categories. I must stress again though how well these recipes pack in the tips. Don't be at all surprised if you learn an applicable view layer or even pure Ruby trick in a database recipe.
If you are a Rails user, I must recommend you pick up this title immediately. I really believe there is something in here for all.
You can purchase Rails Recipes from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Now I realize I've been gushing a little, so let me to balance it with at least some words of caution. First, this book assumes you know Rails. You will not learn Rails here.
Actually, I could hardly read your review, since it was so crammed with non-standard jargon (at least, from my perspective as a longtime C++/Java programmer). Lighten up on the Ruby-specific buzzwords, please! "how to use models in migrations", "integration testing as a DSL", "great YAML tricks for use in fixtures", huh???? It's nice that the book taught you how to do those things, whatever they are, but maybe a review should relate these things to more normal (non-Ruby) programmers' experiences in common language somehow.
Have you read my blog lately?
From the review:
I started sneaking in recipe reads whenever I had a free moment or two and had literally devoured the book in no time.
Okay, so what he's saying is he literally ate the book and, moreover, he ate the book in literally 0.000 seconds.
I conclude the reviewer lacks basic literacy or vocabulary skills. Literally.
The late-90's called. They want their OSS-applies-to-everything philosophy back. Hold on a minute. I have another call... ...Oh, the 90's called again and they want this joke back, too. I have to go now.
No he actually devoured it -- eating books is the latest tenet of eXtreme Programming.
Admittedly, Rails debugging tools cannot compare to those of
As a side note, there are some frameworks in PHP now that can compare to the Rails way of doing things (like CakePHP or Symphony). I still prefer Ruby as a language, but those frameworks seem pretty decent. However, I don't think you can compare pure vanilla PHP to Rails. Here's why I didn't like it. If your building a small project, the model-view-controller thing can get really annoying, with the needing of 3 files for a single web page thing. Yeah, the whole thing about writing good, clean code is pretty annoying. If you're ok with writing shitty code, then by all means, don't ever use Rails
-Aamer
What makes you think that software needs to be "compiled" for large projects? Yahoo is primarily delivered with PHP. Amazon.com is largely Perl. MySpace is largely ColdFusion (migrating to .NET).
Yahoo: http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1 491221
Amazon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_(Perl)
MySpace: http://www.tomasbecklin.com/cf/
Since I'm already familiar with Python and use it on a daily basis, my experience with Ruby has been pretty limited. This puts Ruby on Rails just out of my reach for a new project.
Thankfully, there's I guess what you'd call a rough equivalent, Django which is the first framework I've ever used that hasn't frustrated the hell out of me.
You've got no excuses left, check it out.
Single web page? That isn't a small project... that is a TINY project.
So you don't see any applications somewhere between a tiny project and a large enterprise application? Seems to me that most applications fit in this area. Blogs, forums, CMS, all kinds of things. An intranet is a great place for rails apps.
For one thing, PHP is an ugly language with a hacked together object system and terrible function naming. Ruby blows PHP away as far as scripting languages go. And then add Rail on top of it which totally takes advantage of Ruby's features.
I did PHP for a while, but after writing an app in Rails for first time, I didn't want ot touch another line of PHP again. If I need to throw some simple dynamic content on a website, I'll resort to PHP because it is so readily available, but beyond that, forget it. I won't waste my time.
You fail to see the huge space between PHP and Java.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Hope this helps.