Rails Recipes or AWDWR 2?

Rails
1

Hi,

I bougth the Agile Web D. with rails First Edition and now want
buy rails recipes but what is the best decision buy rails recipes or the
new
edition de Agile Web D. With Rails?

Jean Carlo Schechnner
www.idvirtual.com

2

Jean Carlo S. wrote:

Hi,

I bougth the Agile Web D. with rails First Edition and now want
buy rails recipes but what is the best decision buy rails recipes or the
new
edition de Agile Web D. With Rails?

Jean Carlo Schechnner
www.idvirtual.com

Depends on what skill level you are with Rails. I bought AWDwR1, did the
tutorials twice, but did not do real development. Then I bought Rails
Recipes. Wrong move. Rails Recipes assumes you know a lot beyond AWDwR1.
For example, I couldn’t even get the very first recipe to work – I
didn’t know Migration, and no explanation or reference on how to do it.

Buy AWDwR 2nd edition. I did and it is pleasantly getting me up to date
with knowledge that I’d need to follow some of the Rails Recipes, I’d
hope.

3

I bougth the Agile Web D. with rails First Edition and now want
buy rails recipes but what is the best decision buy rails recipes or the new
edition de Agile Web D. With Rails?

You certainly want to buy both. First AWDWR 2 then RR.

-Sa?a Ebach

4

I disagree. If you’ve been keeping up with the new developments in
rails, you’ve actually been writing code using rails, and you’ve been
learning ruby at a good pace I would skip AWDWR2 and go strait for RR.

Charlie B.
www.recentrambles.com

5

Charlie B. wrote:

I disagree. If you’ve been keeping up with the new developments in
rails, you’ve actually been writing code using rails, and you’ve been
learning ruby at a good pace I would skip AWDWR2 and go strait for RR.

Alright, since Jean now has two opposing opinions he has to find out
himself by reading both :wink: There is however the Ruby for Rails book,
that
might be interesting, too. Although it still covers 1.0.

Saša Ebach

6

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 22:29 +0200, Colin wrote:

Grin… Now it seems all books covering rails have been mentioned.

Rails Recipes: Useless IMHO… Yes it has some ready to use code, but
noting you couldn’t program yourself (assuming you actually used rails,
read the Agile webdev book and used the API documentation. (I still
think the book is a bit odd… as one of the fundamentals behind rails
seemed to be that it would be better to make certain problems easy to
solve than to provide pre-coded plugins, as those plugins would never
cover your exact needs. The Rails Recipes book does nothing but give you
some pre-coded code)

Any good chef will modify his recipes to fit his needs. I don’t think
the book is meant to just be copied into a production site.

Charlie

7

Grin… Now it seems all books covering rails have been mentioned.

Rails Recipes: Useless IMHO… Yes it has some ready to use code, but
noting you couldn’t program yourself (assuming you actually used rails,
read the Agile webdev book and used the API documentation. (I still
think the book is a bit odd… as one of the fundamentals behind rails
seemed to be that it would be better to make certain problems easy to
solve than to provide pre-coded plugins, as those plugins would never
cover your exact needs. The Rails Recipes book does nothing but give you
some pre-coded code)

Active webdev v2. Well it is still in beta, final version expected this
fall. I do not know what is updated and what not. (the final version is
still some months away… I don’t understand why people complain they
bougt edition one and now want edition two free of charge… There is
only a beta… if you don’t want to buy ed 1 because ed 2 is comming,
well just wait till fall… (but this is another discussion). I myself
don’t think I’ll need it, especial not in beta form… Ever since i
started being interested in rails i simply bookmarked all the
announcements of changes / new features. I’ll be able to remember them
;). But as the agile webdev 1 book seems to be the defacto standard
documentation I’m sure the the 2nd edition will be worth your pennies.

Ruby for Rails. Great book. Big surprise. The author sure knows how to
write proper documentation. Maybe it doesn’t cover enough of Rails to be
used as the only documentation. But for me it was a big eyeopener making
me more aware of internals of Rails. Though I have skimmed through pick
axe (defacto ruby documentation) this book made the pieces of the
ruby/rails puzzle fit together. All the more exciting as i though i had
already fitted them in a proper way. It seemed there were more pieces
than I was actually aware of, especially the openness of ruby, and
therefore the rails framework, is dazzling.

8

I like Rails Recipes. I bought the PDF version and use it for projects
that
I am working on. I have never tried to drop the code in Rails Recipies
directly into my application, but I have never really wanted to. What I
like about the book is that it walks me through a concept and a basic
implementation of the concept with real code examples. I may never use
even
the concept behind many of the recipes, but I think it still helped me
improve by showing me another way to do things. In many ways it doesn’t
feel as “meaty” as AWDWR, but I feel that is helping fill the gaps in my
knowledge and skill base. That said, for a more experienced programmer,
this book might not be such a good fit.

9

On 5/5/06, Colin [email protected] wrote:

Rails Recipes: Useless IMHO…

Ruby for Rails. Great book. Big surprise.

Interesting comments. I basically found them to be the opposite. If
you have a deep enough understanding of Rails to grok everything in
Rails Recipes, Ruby for Rails is stuff you already know. I found Ruby
for Rails to be little more than a tutorial guide to the framework.

Pat

10

I bought Rails Recipes i think it is the best option for me

Thank you for you help

Jean Carlo
IDENTIDAD VIRTUAL
www.idvirtual.com

11

Hi –

On Fri, 5 May 2006, Sascha E. wrote:

Charlie B. wrote:

I disagree. If you’ve been keeping up with the new developments in rails,
you’ve actually been writing code using rails, and you’ve been learning
ruby at a good pace I would skip AWDWR2 and go strait for RR.

Alright, since Jean now has two opposing opinions he has to find out himself
by reading both :wink: There is however the Ruby for Rails book, that might be
interesting, too. Although it still covers 1.0.

Actually its principal topic is 1.8.4 – Ruby 1.8.4, that is :slight_smile: It’s
Rails-centric, and written for the benefit of Rails developers, but
it’s fundamentally a book that helps you understand Ruby and use Ruby
effectively, in support of your Rails work and growth. Applying the
lessons of Ruby to specific Rails versions and applications will vary,
but the goal is to give you the background to do it successfully
across a variety of situations, and to have a deep enough
understanding to be adaptable.

So enjoy it, at least until Ruby 2.0, and then we’ll see :slight_smile:

David

–
David A. Black ([email protected])

12

Pat M. wrote:

On 5/5/06, Colin [email protected] wrote:

Rails Recipes: Useless IMHO…

Ruby for Rails. Great book. Big surprise.

Interesting comments. I basically found them to be the opposite. If
you have a deep enough understanding of Rails to grok everything in
Rails Recipes, Ruby for Rails is stuff you already know. I found Ruby
for Rails to be little more than a tutorial guide to the framework.

Pat

Seriously? Sure the book isn’t exactly rocket-science. But, atleast to
me, it does a remarkable good job of explaining the dynamics of ruby.
Rails Recipes explains nothing, it just shows you stuff. While Ruby for
Rails tells (although only in a few chapters) exactly how to totally
“mess up” ruby or rails. In that it goes deeper than Agile webdev, that
book only shows you what to do, while Ruby for Rails explains how it
works.

As example, for my pet project, in rails, I needed to tag items to be
valid. Thus the valid property of the Item object could be either true
or false. Now I wanted all Item.find / Item.count etc methods to only
show the valid once.
Looking for a solution (mind you this started pre 1.1) i found
acts_as_paranoid. I changed it a bit to suit my needs, and voila, I had
an acts_as_limited.
Then rails 1.1 came along. Because it introduced new nestable scopes my
acts_as_validated didn’t work anymore. Once again, I changed it a bit,
this time making it use the new nested scopes.
All this time I knew how it had to be done, but still some things were
obscure to me. Why was there a module ClassMethods why InstanceMethods?!
Sure I knew what those methods did, but it seemed odd to extend
Activerecord in such an circumvent way. Only after reading Ruby for
Rails I fully understand how and why this works / is done.