This book was hands down the best technical book I’ve ever read. Through some kind of magic voodo, Dave Thomas has written a book that is accessable and enjoyable to read for both novices and experts alike.

For its tiny footprint, it covers everything you could need to know about Ruby, and the Rails framework. Its style is light and has just enough humor to make it fun without overdoing or making it hard to follow it like some other books (*cough*Programming Perl*cough*.) I really liked that their running example was a “real world” shopping cart rather then something very abstract like a “Gilligans Island” or some other silly nonsense.

Even if you have no interest in Ruby or Rails, and even if you think the whole platform is a bunch of overhyped rubbish (it is not by the way), you should still buy this book just to know what a good technical book should be.

If you’re a web programmer, buy this book right now. Do it. Now. Rails has been hyped a lot, so I won’t add to it. I’m just gonna tell you what I know from working with it myself.

— And then talks about ruby not the book —

People in the real world have seen twenty to one code reduction going from J2EE to Rails. Twenty to one. Think about that.

I fell in love with Rails after trying it about a year ago

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But the danger with any computer book published before its subject goes 1.0 is that it will be out of date, and that’s somewhat true in this case. Near as I can tell, everything in the book still works, but any new features added since 0.13.x are missing.

It’s also a so-so reference. I find that plenty of times I have to go to the online api docs to answer a question that the book doesn’t touch, or covers lightly. I suspect that will suit some people just fine, but I like a real, comprehensive dead- trees reference book. Perhaps now that 1.0 is here and the APIs are stable, we’ll see something like that.

In the end, despite growing pains, this is one book any rails developer would do well to keep at the ready. Recommended and looking forward to the second edition.

There aren’t many (any) other books on Rails development currently, so this book has a sigular distinction: it’s the only option. Somewhere in this book is all the information you might need to get a good foundation going in Rails development. The writing is nice and easy on the brain.

But, the organization of the book didn’t really appeal to my particular learning style. I wasn’t so interested in continuing work on the very basic shopping cart app that is the “tutorial” in this book. I was more interested in things like working with complex, multi- table databases.

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Overall, I think this is a decent intro to Rails. But I would rather have a Peachpit Press type book, with straight forward code examples used in context. That’s just a personal viewpoint, and you very well might think this book is a 5 out of 5. For me, I’ll give it a 4. But I would still urge you to buy it – it will prove a valuable reference as you find specific questions to look up.