Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications (Book Review)
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve worked through Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz, currently available as a free PDF download from Sitepoint. As an intermediate Java programmer, and I say that extremely timidly, my background knowledge already included Object Oriented concepts but it was worth reading the first five chapters simply to gain the context. The step by step nature of the rest of the book was reasonably easy to follow although I would suggest anyone not confident in their debugging skills might simply cut-and-paste code snippets and constantly check against the errata for potential broken code.
Overall I took a lot away from reading this book. Its strength is the assumption the reader has never programmed before to any complexity so practically every line is thoroughly explained. I also took a lot away from it about the methodologies involved in creating and maintaining test regimes within the process.
The real question is would I feel confident to dive into a Ruby on Rails application by myself? No of course not. I don’t think many reading a single book with or without a project to walk through could seriously make any significant application the following week. But books aren’t actually about that. What Patrick Lenz has provided the reader is a solid understanding of what the framework can achieve and the overview necessary to learn more.
I would feel confident to use Ruby on Rails now for something simple. Or I would be confident to enter a team environment where Ruby on Rails was the framework. Nobody can really ask more of an entry level book. Whether I do use it or not is quite another story and only time will tell if I head down the Web 2.0 application trail. I have a few small ideas.
I did have a few minor hiccups with the book - particularly an inability to get ruby-debug downloaded and installed correctly. But that’s a minor issue. Even if that issue stole a little from my confidence to attempt something a little more complex. And let’s face it programming books are a hard slog so don’t expect the sections on debugging, testing, plugins and deployment to be anything but what they have to be.
I’d highly recommend anyone, particularly from an Object Oriented background, to pick this one up while its free over on Sitepoint. I think my next step is to work on something quite basic and solidify Patrick’s fundamental knowledge before thinking about making anything more advanced. But you never know your luck in the big city…
