Patrick Lenz, Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications (Sitepoint, 2007)



The main problem with a technology that's advancing as fast as Ruby on Rails is that by the time the books become affordable, they're out of date. It's that aspect of Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications that makes the rating I'm giving it so low; it would have another star were it still up to date, but there are things Lenz tells us how to do in Rails 1.2 that no longer work in later versions (for example, setting up a column in a migration using "t.column :name, :string" will now throw an error; as I write this, the current syntax would be "t.string :name", but by the time you read this, that will have probably changed again). There are also a small number of errors in proofreading (in the testing of the application he builds over the course of the book, he changes the name of one variable from :another to :second, then a few chapters later wants us to add values to :another) and one philosophical stance that's bound to drive some folks nuts (he advocates writing unit tests after writing code, which often leads to the programmer writing the tests to accommodate the code rather than the other way around). So much for the book's shortcomings.



Other than that, though, I thought this was really useful. Given that one of those problems is an annoyance at best and one of them is an opinion more than a problem, that leaves you with a book that, were it updated, would be pretty darned good still. Lenz takes you through the building and testing of a fully functional web application (a Digg clone). While he doesn't get into some of the more advanced features that Ruby on Rails makes easier for the programmer, I'm realizing, the more books on Rails I read, that none of them do, so I can't count points off for that. At the end of the book, after all, you do end up with a functional, if somewhat barebones, application, and you learn a decent amount along the way. A new edition covering Rails 2.3 would be most welcome, Unfortunately, by the time it was ready for press, Rails would probably be another three versions down the road, and so the circle continues. ** ½