Rails Cookbook

honestpuck writes "When reading the foreword of Rails Cookbook I felt a strong kinship with Zed Shaw, I too have fond memories of the first edition of Perl Cookbook and the way I relied on it once I'd taken the training wheels off. Since that one I have relied on several of the O'Reilly Cookbook series. It is only when I discard the early tutorial and dive in the deep end with a "cookbook" on my desk that I really start to learn proficiency." Read the rest of honestpuck's review. Rails Cookbook author Rob Orsini pages 514 publisher O'Reilly rating 7 reviewer honestpuck ISBN 0596527314 summary for programmers who know something about web development but are early in their use of Rails,

I felt timorous and unsure when I finished Agile Web Development with Rails, a marvelous tutorial that introduced me to my first real web development framework (I must have enjoyed it, I just bought the second edition). Since I have volunteered to develop a fairly large and complex web application in Rails I awaited the arrival of my copy of Rails Cookbook with hopeful anticipation and bated breath.

Rob Orsini, his fellow contributors (15 in all) and the team at O'Reilly have once again delivered. Compared to the previous titles in the series I've owned Rails Cookbook seems to have fewer recipes but as it is tackling an entire application framework and some serious issues, some of the solutions and discussions run a lot longer. The book is targeted at programmers who know something about web development but are early in their use of Rails, though it should be helpful to all Rails developers.

The book starts with tackling issues of installation and getting development tools installed in the first two chapters. Despite already deploying a couple of simple Rails apps I found that there was the odd useful tip in these chapters. The book then covers each of the three main sections of Rails; Active Record, Action View and Action Controller. The rest of the book goes on with large chapters on testing, Javascript, debugging, performance and hosting and deployment. Along the way it also covers REST, Action Mailer, security, plug-ins and graphics.

The extremely large section on Active Record was to me the most useful. I seem to spend an inordinate percentage of my Rails coding time with Active Record and it contains a large part of Rails power so I appreciated the size of this chapter. By contrast the chapter on graphics is almost entirely unread.

It seems obvious that this book should be compared to Pragmatic's Rails Recipes. The first point of difference is that Rails Cookbook covers installation and setup. The second point is that is 'Recipes' covers Rails 1.1 while 'Cookbook' targets the brand new Rails 1.2. As a project fairly new on the scene Rails is a fast moving target so the six months between the two books makes a difference. Both books have excellent coverage of the various aspects of Rails, with a great deal of overlap. 'Recipes' has more, shorter pieces while 'Cookbook' tends towards longer pieces with more discussion. 'Cookbook' is also more general, with more recipes more likely to be useful in every Rails project you write.

The style is different between the two. Here Cookbook comes off second best, it feels as though tightly edited by a number of hands and ends up lacking personality; functional but cold compared to Recipes. The writing, however, is good. It's easily read, at times it feels like a good textbook. The layout is clean, it is easy to find the information you need from each recipe when you want.

With almost all "cookbook" style books I seem to be left feeling that a number of the recipes are just a little too obvious and covered well in beginner tutorials. There is some of this in Rails Cookbook, most notably the first two chapters, but overall the book will be useful to any beginner to intermediate Rails programmer. Personally I had a couple of moments where I read a tip and wanted to scream as it demonstrated and explained in a few short sentences and half a page of code what had taken me hours to discover for myself.

The "Cookbook" series all seem to be books worth the price and shelf space. This one is no exception. I'd give it three out of five with an extra half for its timely information on Rails 1.2 and would recommend it for all Rails programmers from the absolute beginner through to all but the most experienced. If you already have a copy of 'Recipes' and are happy with it then you might want to stick with that till either volume is updated for the next major revision of Rails, otherwise you will almost certainly appreciate a copy of Rails Cookbook.

You can purchase Rails Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

You can get it for more at B&N

[stoolpigeon]

You can get it for $4 more at B&N

Re:Yeah

[nmb3000]

I think this has been reviewed once or twice before on Slashdot

No, no. That was Rails Recipes. Completely different. That's just a bunch of recipes. This is a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!

Re:Yeah

[tcopeland]

> then I'd strongly recommend getting a separate
> reference book just for Ruby by itself.

The Ruby Way is an excellent book for that, plus, the author, Hal Fulton, is a nice guy. And his RubyForge user account name is "hal9000", for which he gets additional points.

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)

[MrTranscendence]

Hey, man, leave C++ out of this.

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Make Rails Thread safe so the only option isn't to run multiple applications sucking up even more memory and I might be inclined to think it is a useful framework. WTF?! No I don't want to run a "pack of mongrels" or more than one FCGI process. Give me a break.

Rails is awesome for developers (cause it's easy) but from a system and resource POV it's atrocious. And I thought I'd never find something that I disliked as much as PHP (due to security concerns, again, don't get me wrong, it has it's place).

--Irate Systems Engineer.

Lifted from the Better Book...

[jaredbpd]

I had this book for about 26 hours before I returned it, I was deeply displeased by the repetition from the existing work, Rails Recipes. All the cookbook entries about model relationships, polymorphic associations, etc, were lifted straight from Rails Recipes, right down to using Magazines, Readers and Subscriptions as the example objects.

And, while the book has a shiny "Rails 1.2" badge on the cover, very little of it had anything to do with Rails 1.2 whatsoever, there were only a handful of recipes in the very back which dealt with the new features.

Plus, was it really necessary to burn 3 pages talking about how to join a discussion group of fellow Rails developers? If you're a web developer and you can't find an online community to discuss the language/framework, you need more help than Rob's book is able to offer...

Re:Rails is Doomed

[swimmar132]

I think Rails has already "caught on".

Also, that blog post has a ton of errors. Here's one: If you want to write a Web application in Ruby, there is only one solution. Only one. Ruby on Rails. Hm, about about Camping or Nitro?

Rails scales perfectly well, just the same as any other share-nothing approach.

Ugh, so much FUD.

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)

[Greenisus]

Ruby on Rails is like the Macintosh of programming languages / web frameworks. So, the insulting comes quite naturally.

Re:Rails is Doomed

[Temujin_12]

No...THIS is why Lisp never caught on:
(defun fibonacci (nn)
  "Return 2 consecutive Fibonacci numbers."
  (declare (type (integer 0) nn))
  (case nn
    (0 (values 0 0)) (1 (values 1 0)) (2 (values 1 1)) (3 (values 2 1))
    (t (multiple-value-bind (mm rr) (floor nn 2)
         (declare (integer mm) (type (integer 0 1) rr))
         (multiple-value-bind (f0 f1) (fibonacci mm)
           (declare (type (integer 0) f0 f1))
           (if (zerop rr)
               (values (* f0 (+ (* f1 2) f0))
                       (+ (* f0 f0) (* f1 f1)))
               (values (+ (* f0 f0) (sqr (+ f0 f1)))
                       (* f0 (+ (* f1 2) f0)))))))))

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)

[PopeRatzo]

I'm a geek who uses technology in the service of the arts, but I've never been a programmer. Can anyone recommend a language in which I can learn the basics of programming, but is still powerful enough for me to do useful things? I'm comfortable with a soldering iron and piano, but the mysteries of writing code have always been outside my ken.

I don't want to become a professional, I'd just like to do know what to do when I have to write a script and make simple web apps. The only real programmers I know are hardcore types who snicker whenever I ask them this question and like to pretend that what they do is some sort of priesthood, whose secrets are not easily given up. Something tells me that they just don't want me to know how easy it is.

So I'm asking you people: I don't have the time to go back to school for a CS degree, and I'm not looking to program databases for a living, but I've got the feeling that I can manipulate documents, sound files, midi a lot easier if I knew some programming. Help a brother out here. What language would be the easiest for a novice to learn and still be able to do something worthwhile?

Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)

[nuzak]

Python's definitely a good fit. It's not my favorite language in the world, but it's got sensible syntax that isn't too alien (the indent thing really won't bite you unless you have a really crappy editor or you copy and paste code). And it also has loads of libraries, good support for all major platforms (OSX support is so-so, but pyobjc is nice), and a lot of people who can help you out (#python on irc.freenode.net for example).

Here's the bad part: there's virtually no decent introductory programming texts for python or most other languages. Most of them tacitly assume you know some other language and gloss over basic things like structuring a program with control flow, functional (de)composition, and proper use of objects, or they make a hash out of trying to introduce them. To that end, I'd really recommend Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka SICP) as a learning text, but dear lord is it tedious and didactic. It's also going to teach you an abstract way of thinking that doesn't really map to python's practical structures (i.e. you're never going to use tail recursion generally, let alone an amb operator).

I really love smalltalk for playing around with programming, not so much for the language itself (it's just okay) but for the way that you don't think about "compiling" or "modules" so much as you just have objects that you fiddle around with, and your changes just happen. Unfortunately, Squeak is such a poorly-documented disastrous hodgepodge that I can't recommend it to new programmers.

So it's kind of a desert out there for decent introductory texts, but a language with good community support and mostly helpful people will be a big boost, and python does stand out.

Re:Rails is Doomed

[ari_j]

Everyone knows Haskell is the best language for writing a Fibonnaci generator.

You really do just have to choose the best language based on the problem you are solving. After all, every language is good at one thing, and Fibanacci generators are Haskell's. :P

Re:Rails is Doomed

[drix]

Yes, it's easy to obfuscate almost any language. I think someone who wasn't being quite so tendentious might write:

(defun fib (n)
    "nth element of the Fibonacci sequence"
    (check-type n (integer 0 *))
    (if (< n 2) n
            (+ (fib (1- n)) (fib (- n 2)))))

Lisp is a pretty good language. Its reasons for not catching on have more to do with its grassroots beginnings (no M$ Visual Lisp) and the fact that GC/automatic memory management was about 40 years ahead of its time in terms of the hardware needed to run it well. And besides, who was it that said that behind every C or C++ program lurks a buggy, slow implementation of Common Lisp? All the cool ideas in languages these days (first class functions, dynamic typing, OOP, metacircular evaluation) were originally implemented in Lisp.

Re:Rails is Doomed

[kubalaa]

That's a highly optimized algorithm. If you think that looks bad, check out the equivalent C code.

typedef struct {
    int first;
    int second;
} intpair;
 
unsigned int sqr(unsigned int x) { return x*x; }
intpair fibonacci(unsigned int nn) {
    intpair out;
    switch (nn) {
        case 0: out.first = 0; out.second = 0; return out;
        case 1: out.first = 1; out.second = 0; return out;
        case 2: out.first = 1; out.second = 1; return out;
        case 3: out.first = 2; out.second = 1; return out;
    }
    unsigned int mm = nn >> 1;
    unsigned short int rr = nn & 1;
    intpair f = fibonacci(mm);
    unsigned int f0 = f.first;
    unsigned int f1 = f.second;
    if (rr == 0) {
        out.first = f0*(f1*2 + f0);
        out.second = f0*f0 + f1*f1;
    } else {
        out.first = f0*f0 + sqr(f0 + f1);
        out.second = f0*(f1*2 + f0);
        return out;
    }
}

Obviously if you already know C you'll find the C version easier to understand, but if you don't I think it's hard to argue that this is any more obvious than the Lisp version, and it's a lot longer. Oh yeah, and it doesn't even get the right answers:

fibonacci(1231243) => {524936933, -1076064072}