Ruby For Rails
Coming from a PHP and Perl world, I've been working on learning Ruby on Rails since I joined VeriSign. Started writing an app awhile ago, but ran into not really finding a good succinct guide of how to go about it. Do you write your own SQL or use migrations and why is there no good guide to a one-to-one-to-one relationship of models, views, and controllers versus what I see being done in Rails apps? I never really got into the books Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide or Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide. Both seemed to expect I already had a solid basic understanding of Ruby and Rails. I found a variety of tutorials around the web, but each contradicted the last. I saw the review of Ruby For Rails on Slashdot a few days ago and it looked interesting. Bought it overnight off of Amazon, had it shipped up to Portland where I was for a few days, and dug into it that night; it seems to be the exact book I was looking for.
It starts with a nice introduction to Rails, why it exists, what it does, and how it builds upon Ruby. It tells me enough to get started, but not too much to confuse me. It gives clear recommendations of how to get started and explains why it is making the recommendations that it does. It starts with a demo application, building the database schema, the models, the controllers, and the views. Then two chapters later revisits the app and adds to it.
So I know I'll get back to the Agile Development and Programming Ruby books, but I really recommend you take a look at Ruby For Rails if you’ve been like me and frustrated about figuring out how to get started.
