The art of Rails

What Hacker News says

1. ludicastNov 2010
   I tend to get too distracted to give many books the cover-to-cover treatment. Some great ones that made the cut were:

   1) Metaprogramming Ruby.

   2) The Art of Rails.

   3) Ruby Design Patterns

   4) Services-Oriented Architecture in Ruby

   These stick out for me. Even if the last one in the list felt a little "rushed to production", it still covered important topics you won't find anywhere else. Plus I find when a book has typos (either in the text or in the code), that just makes me engage with it a little bit more.

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2. acangianoAug 2009
   For Ruby books, checkout my page here:

   * Recommended Ruby Books (http://antoniocangiano.com/ruby-and-rails-recommended-books/)

   I have not updated the Rails page yet, but you should be fine with:

   * Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition (http://www.pragprog.com/titles/rails3/agile-web-development-...)

   Other books you may want to consider afterward are:

   * The Art of Rails (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Rails-Programmer/dp/0470189487)

   * Enterprise Rails (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515201/).

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3. csbartusJun 2009
   Learning RoR -- and maybe other web frameworks too -- is not easy. There are at least two phases of the learning process: learning Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework, then get acquainted with the RoR ecosystem -- github, deployment, existing reusable projects and components, best development environment, how the community works etc etc.

   As a first step I recommend reading books, start coding, participating in simple open source projects/gems on github. Get the RoR style.

   Then get on the flow by reading RubyFlow, try other things than Rails like Sinatra, ruby screen scraping etc etc. Get the RoR/Ruby perspective.

   I highly recommend community-powered resources for all of these:

   - Rubyflow, PlanetRubyOnRails : the everyday news, announcements - Apidock : ruby, rails, rspec guides - Rails Guides : up-to-date Rails doc in a readable format - Ruby Toolbox, RubyTrends : all about the ecosystem in real-time. You'll learn here what modules to use/digg in, how to extend your sources of information.

   Personally I would recommend two books: Design Patterns in Ruby by Russ Olsen and The Art of Rails by Edward Benson

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4. csbartusMay 2009
   if you are new to programming you should read these two books (not free i'm afraid):

   Design Patterns in Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby… by Russ Olsen

   The Art of Rails (Programmer to Programmer) by Edward Benson

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5. edwardbensonMay 2008
   @ambition - not a snarky question at all. The Rails book market is certainly growing crowded, so I think it is a very valid question. I hope this isn't a cheesy thing to say, but I really tried to make this the book I wish that I had to guide me after I had been experimenting with Rails for a while.

   This book is different for a few important reasons:

   First off, it speaks to issues of design rather than issues of API. That has important ramifications in the way the material is covered. Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic) and The Rails Way (Addison) are two fantastic books, and both are on the shelf next to my desk right now, but they both concentrate on exhaustive coverage of the Rails API. The Art of Rails is meant to be the kind of book you buy after owning one of those. It takes someone familiar with the /syntax/ of coding Rails and attempts to provide guidance and insight into the /style/ and design patterns of architecting an entire application with Rails.

   Second, it devotes three whole chapters (8, 9, and 10) to developing with the "Ruby style". So many web developers learn Ruby because of Rails that they eventually get to a point in their Rails development skills where they stand to really benefit by taking a few steps outside of Rails to learn how Ruby is a fundamentally different language than {PHP, Java, other OO/Procedural languages}. The Art of Rails really devotes a significant effort to talking about the new and Ruby-centric design patterns that constructs like blocks, Procs, method_missing, and instance_eval make possible, and then it provides examples of how you can use these design patterns in your Rails applications.

   Third, it backs up design patterns with useful, concise examples that you can actually execute, but otherwise stays clear from drowning you with example code that is better left to online format.

   Finally, I wrote it to read cover-to-cover, or at least a chapter at a time, whereas a lot of tech books these days are really centered around dictionary-style reference lookup. This book should be fun to read, have you nodding your head, and leave you with some useful abstractions, coding techniques, and new tricks when you're done.

   I'll stop here to prevent myself from leaving a run-on comment, but thanks for pushing back for more justification of the book

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6. eobNov 2010
   Hey, I wrote the Art of Rails. You just made my day putting it on your list. Thanks a lot, ludicast.
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