Hi –
My book “Ruby for Rails” is now being released one chapter at a time
through the Manning Early Access Program, with the whole book
due to appear on May 1.
If you’re interested, see Ruby for Rails
(I guess I could have just sent my sig with no body, but anyway 
David
–
David A. Black ([email protected])
Ruby Power and Light (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
Has anyone picked this up? What do you think so far?
-Kelly
I read the first chapter last night. David knows his stuff, and I
think this book is going to be a good resource.
I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a vital reference for
expert Rails hackers, but if the rest of the book goes as planned, I’m
going to pick up a pile of them to give to Rails trainees.
–Wilson.
David,
The table of contents and chapter 1 should be accessible for free.
Alain
On Feb 10, 2006, at 10:29 AM, Kelly F. wrote:
Has anyone picked this up? What do you think so far?
I had the opportunity to participate in the review process of the
book, and it turns out that I’m allowed to talk about it
The book, in my opinion, is notable on four counts:
There are a lot of programmers wanting to work in Rails but they
do not know Ruby. There is plenty of evidence that they can get quite
far without paying any attention to Ruby as a programming language.
At some point, they’ll want to know more. This book will keep those
people going. There is something to be said for learning a language
in this way – if nothing else it keeps things grounded.
There is a lot of talk about domain specific languages these days.
This book provides a comprehensive and detailed illustration of the
concepts involved. The example is Rails-as-DSL the implementation
language is Ruby, of course, but the ideas work in any programming
language with the capability to implement a DSL.
If there are any programmers still unfamiliar with what you gain
by using a dynamic language there is plenty in here to illustrate the
point. No debate, no controversy, just evidence.
Chapter 13 is wonderful.
If you are familiar with David Black’s contributions to Ruby over the
years you’ll have a very good idea of the tone and competence
expressed. Easy to read, to the point yet aware of wider issues than
simply Ruby for Rails.
I’ve already recommended it to a bunch of people.
Cheers,
Bob
If you’re interested, see Ruby for Rails
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
Bob H. – blogs at <http://www.recursive.ca/
hutch/>
Recursive Design Inc. – http://www.recursive.ca/
Raconteur – http://www.raconteur.info/
xampl for Ruby – http://rubyforge.org/projects/xampl/
Hi david,
Looking at the TOC and your background, I think this will be the
rails/ruby book for all rails developers!!!
How many chapters are release each week? is it one a week till May?
Hi –
On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Abdur-Rahman A. wrote:
Hi david,
Looking at the TOC and your background, I think this will be the rails/ruby
book for all rails developers!!!
Thanks – I hope you’re right
How many chapters are release each week? is it one a week till May?
I think it has to be more than one per week, to have them all ready by
May It will probably vary, but on average I’m hoping for more
like two per week. The chapters are all basically written; what’s
happening now is that they’re being copy edited, tech edited,
proofread, and, along the way, rescrutinized and troubleshot by me.
So at least a large number of them should go through the process
pretty efficiently.
David
David
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
–
David A. Black ([email protected])
Ruby Power and Light (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
It looks like it is mostly ruby. Are the examples going to be from
rails?
or just the second and last chapter?
[email protected] wrote:
My book “Ruby for Rails” is now being released one chapter at a time
through the Manning Early Access Program, with the whole book
due to appear on May 1.
Congrats David!
–
John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com
Hi –
On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, anne g wrote:
It looks like it is mostly ruby. Are the examples going to be from rails?
or just the second and last chapter?
It’s all Ruby, but some of it is also Rails A lot of examples
throughout the book do come from Rails apps and also the Rails source.
(The last chapter is specifically about exploring the source, but
other source examples occur at other points.) Not all of them do –
but let’s just say that if you approached this as a general-purpose
Ruby book, you’d find yourself repeatedly wondering, “Why is this guy
so obsessed with tying all this stuff in with Rails?!”
David
–
David A. Black ([email protected])
Ruby Power and Light (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
Hi –
On Sun, 12 Feb 2006, Ken K. wrote:
Instead, I started irb and entered “> require ‘rbconfig’” and it seems to be
working. That’s a bit odd, though, because I thought I tried it this
morning without success, but at least it’s working now.
In Rubys up to (I think) 1.8.2, irb didn’t accept the run-in extension
name with
the -r switch, but now it does. I should update the examples of the
-v and --version switches to reflect post-1.8.2-ness, since right now
it appears I’m using 1.8.2 but the irb behavior doesn’t match.
I’m looking forward to reading future chapters.
Thanks! Chapter 2 is up, as you’ve probably seen, and Chapter 3 is
near the end of the conveyor belt…
David
From: [email protected]
due to appear on May 1.
Ruby Power and Light (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
Rails mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
–
David A. Black ([email protected])
Ruby Power and Light (http://www.rubypowerandlight.com)
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
On 2/16/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:
Thanks! Chapter 2 is up, as you’ve probably seen, and Chapter 3 is
near the end of the conveyor belt…
Earlier this week, I bought the ebook+paper version for a couple of
reasons.
One, I wanted to demo Manning’s ebook process. I’ve been using
O’Reilly Safari for years and I love it, but their rough cut books are
horrible.
Two, I wanted a new Ruby book.
In the first two chapters I haven’t hit anything new and amazing yet,
but it’s well written and I’m happy with it so far. I’m looking
forward to the more in-depth information in later chapters.
The quality is that of a finished Manning product (i.e. top quality).
It looks like a PDF of what you’ll be seeing when it’s printed. I
just copied the files up to my strongspace account, and now I can read
it wherever I go.
– James
I just bought the book (both electronic and hard-copy form – I’m a
sucker
for RoR books these days) and read the available chapter.
As background, I’ve only been working with Ruby and RoR for a couple of
months now, though I’ve been teaching and working with J2EE for many
years.
I read the bulk of the pickaxe book and recently completed the Agile
Development book. Therefore, I have lots of book knowledge at the
moment,
but not a lot of experience yet. That means I can get myself into
trouble
easily but struggle to get out of it.
Chapter 1 (the only available chapter) is clearly written for novice
programmers. It almost has a “Ruby for Dummies” feel to it, especially
compared to the pickaxe. Still, it’s clear and a quick and easy read.
I did have one problem, though. I’m running Ruby 1.8.2 on a Win XP
machine,
after using the one-click installer. The book suggests on page 25 that
I
start up irb using the rbconfig module ($ irb -rrbconfig) in order to
examine configuration information about my installation. When I tried
that,
I got:
“in ‘parse_opts’: Unrecognized switch: -rrbconfig
(IRB::UnrecognizedSwitch)”
and a stack trace.
Instead, I started irb and entered “> require ‘rbconfig’” and it seems
to be
working. That’s a bit odd, though, because I thought I tried it this
morning without success, but at least it’s working now.
I’m looking forward to reading future chapters.
Ken
–
Kenneth A. Kousen, Ph.D.
President
Kousen IT, Inc.
http://www.kousenit.com
[email protected]
“Ruby for Rails” chapters now available
from Manning Early Access Program! Ruby for Rails
I also wrote up a short review of the several different beta book
offerings, including Mr. Black’s excellent Ruby for Rails. So far I am
loving it, releasing two chapters or so a week makes me feel like I’m
back in college!
And I never went to college!
I’ve now made it through Chapter 2 and thought I’d comment on it here.
If Chapter 1 was “Ruby for Dummies,” then chapter 2 starts out as “Rails
for
Dummies,” but doesn’t stay that way. The beginning is a discussion of
the
classic MVC architecture and how the Rails framework libraries map to
the
various parts. Since my development box is a Win XP machine, my
directory
structure is a bit different from the one shown, but similar enough that
the
mappings were clear.
Where life starts to get really interesting is the development of the
sample
app (R4RMusic, short for Ruby for Rails Music Store) that is used in the
rest of the book. As many Rails developers apparently do, the author
started with the database and worked from there. The database consists
of
three tables and the associations that come with them.
One difference between this book and the others I’ve read is that the
SQL
provided to create the database in this case does not try to enforce
foreign
key relationships. That’s of course done in the Ruby code, using
belongs_to
and has_many relationships (interestingly, the sample does not use an
HABTM
relationship at this point), but the SQL creating the tables only lists
items like “composer_id” which will handle the relationship, but doesn’t
include any foreign key constraints in it. The AWDWR book (Thomas and
DHH)
has an extended discussion of this issue and makes it very clear that
the
true nature of relationships can’t be inferred from the database, but
even
in their book they add in foreign key constraints in their SQL.
Rather than try to download the code (a download is mentioned more than
once, but I don’t know if it’s yet available – besides, I wanted the
practice) I typed everything in by hand. I used RadRails 0.5.3 inside
Eclipse 3.1.1, incidentally, but that’s the only deviation I made from
the
demonstration itself.
Another major deviation from other Rails books is that the author does
not
immediately use the scaffold generator. Instead, the “generate model”
and
“generate controller” scripts were used repeatedly. Since generating
the
controller winds up generating the view as well, the basic files were
then
present for editing. The only difference I noticed is that the basic
CRUD
functionality wasn’t there any more.
Minor typo: In Listing 2.2, the second INSERT INTO line has two
“VALUES”
key words in it, one at the end of the first line and one at the
beginning
of the second line.
The chapter then shifts to the controllers and illustrates how easily
one
can use a finder class method to access all the records in each table.
I
found it notable that in the “Composer.find(:all)” method, the author
chose
to do sorting by appending a Ruby block instead of using the “:order”
symbol
in the find. Presumably something like “Composer.find(:all, :order ==>
“last_name, first_name”)” would have worked just as well as the block,
but I
haven’t tried it yet.
The controllers each include a “show” action which sets the relevant
entity
(@work, @edition, or @composer) using the “:id” param. Then we switch
to
the view.
The description of the view included a base layout, which was saved as
an
rhtml file, then the line “layout ‘base’” was added to the
application.rb
controller. The author mentioned that the layout could have been saved
as
“application.rhtml” directly and avoided this, but I agree it was useful
to
see the separation.
Listing 2.3 has a typo, by the way. Presumably the lines
“”
were meant to be included at the bottom of the listing, especially since
the
DOCTYPE was for XHTML 1.0 Strict.
The views themselves were all clear and easy to understand. They simply
used some erb to loop through the entities and display them, with
appropriate links.
Another unusual part of the demo is that rather than generate an index
method and thereby use the index view, the author created a separate
welcome
page and then had to edit routes.rb to make the application go there by
default. That’s not a problem, of course, and it was actually
interesting
to see how that was done. I just found it unusual relative to the other
books.
The last few pages of the chapter are the fun part. That’s where the
author
walks the reader through the actual call sequence, even separating out
the
web server calls (he uses Apache as an example) from the internal Rails
calls. I found that quite good, though I was expecting him to use the
same
R4RMusic application as an example rather than talking about a
completely
unrelated one.
In conclusion, I really liked this chapter. It’s true that parts of it
felt
overly basic or simplistic, but the demo worked and the walkthrough at
the
end was interesting.
I’m looking forward to digging into Chapter 3, now that I know it’s
available.
Ken
–
Kenneth A. Kousen, Ph.D.
President
Kousen IT, Inc.
http://www.kousenit.com
[email protected]
On 2/16/06, James L. [email protected] wrote:
On 2/16/06, [email protected] [email protected] wrote:
Thanks! Chapter 2 is up, as you’ve probably seen, and Chapter 3 is
near the end of the conveyor belt…Earlier this week, I bought the ebook+paper version for a couple of reasons.
One, I wanted to demo Manning’s ebook process. I’ve been using
O’Reilly Safari for years and I love it, but their rough cut books are
horrible.
I’m responding to myself in case this turns up in a search for
someone. It appears that O’Reilly has cleaned up their Rough Cuts. I
gave it a second chance with Rails Cookbook, and it looks a lot more
like a real book than my first impression of whatever it was I viewed
as a Rough Cuts demo.
I can’t speak to the content yet, as I’ve only just started to dig
into the book, but so far so good.
– James
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