Book Review: Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications by Patrick Lenz

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

In the past two years, Ruby on Rails has shaken up the web development industry by providing an application framework whose goal is to increase the speed and ease of web development. Computerworld named it number one of the "Five Hot Technologies of 2007." Ruby on Rails, often shortened to RoR or just Rails, is an open source project that is written in the Ruby language.

The goal of Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications is to shorten the learning curve for your ramp up to Rails. The platform is well suited to design-oriented people looking to build web applications as well as to those who are unhappy with the languages and/or frameworks they are currently using. The author clearly states "I don't expect you to be an expert programmer - this isn’t a pro-level book"

The book is divided into twelve chapters that guide you methodically toward developing a social website application. In fact, the application that you develop is based on the popular story-sharing web site Digg.com.

The first four chapters get you started in understanding what Rails is and how to install it; there are instructions for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. You then get introduced to Ruby, a scripting language that you will use to develop your Rails application before you get into the Rails framework.

In chapter five you actually begin to develop the application, called Shovell. Here, Lenz describes using the Rails model generator to create a "story" model so that everything else can be built around it. He also discusses views and you then build a controller to handle communications between models and views.

Chapter six adds functionality via form helpers as well as building unit and functional test cases. Chapter seven looks at Ajax to add voting functionality and Web 2.0 for good looking effects. Chapter eight covers protective measures, or how to manage users and user's rights.

Throughout the core portion of the text, as well as the remaining chapters, the author is also, indirectly, teaching you about dynamic website development. You have HTML, CSS, XML as well as databases and both server and client code. I believe that by using Rails and the features of both Ruby and Rails, it makes this integrated learning almost seamless.

The remaining chapters cover more advance topics such as writing your own helpers, using callbacks, and creating complex associations. There is also more on unit and functional testing. The author describes the use of plug-ins and how they can add functionality to your site. He also describes benchmarking and debugging your site and then finishes up with deployment.

What you will learn from Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications:

• Build and deploy a complete Rails web application
• Use Rails' Ajax features to create slick interfaces.
• Reap the benefits of a best-practice MVC architecture.
• Work with databases easily using ActiveRecord.
• Create a user authentication system.
• Use object-oriented concepts like inheritance and polymorphism.
• Use migrations to manage your database schema without data loss.
• Achieve maximum code reuse with filters and helper functions.
• Analyze your application's performance using the Rails logging infrastructure.
• Benchmark your application to determine performance bottlenecks.
• Much, much more…

This is a perfect book if you are looking to get into Web 2.0 development and want a step-by-step guide to bring you up to speed. It does a good job of introducing Model-View-Controller architecture as well as laying out testing methods as being important with the implementation of unit and functional testing. Finally, I like the clear, concise and entertaining style that the author uses in presenting his material.

Book Review: Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini

by T. Michael Testi (Blogcritics.org , PhotographyToday, ATAEE)

Rob Orsini opens his book Rails Cookbook by saying that Ruby on Rails has revolutionized the process of developing web applications and has enabled web developers to become much faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker application development. It is my opinion that the O'Reilly Cookbook series has done the same for software development. The fact is that it allows developers to become faster and more efficient, which allows for quicker development by providing time tested tricks and pearls of wisdom; exactly what you need when you need it.

Rails Cookbook is meant for someone with web development skills, but who may be new to Rails. It is also for those who are trying to learn new techniques in Rails and want a clear, concise method to learn it without having to read an entire book. In this cookbook there are over 170 recipes broken into 15 chapters. Together they provide a wide range of solutions that will help you test, debug, and improve your application.

In "Getting Started" you will learn how to install, update and set up version control with Subversion. "Rails Development" will show you how to begin development in Rails by creating a rails project and introducing other add-ons to make development more efficient.

"Active Record" shows you how to set up a relational database to use with Rails as well as working with the concept of Active Record which allows you to define the logic of your domain model using Ruby. "Action Controller" teaches you how to handle the incoming requests and how they hand off each request to a particular action. "Action View" completes the triumvirate of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern by showing how the data is presented to the user.

"RESTful Development" explores the Rails world of building full-featured web services within the Rails environment. "Rails Application Testing" shows how being proactive in the approach to testing comes by writing the tests before you write the code - by thinking about what the code should not do, then creating a test to make sure that it doesn't.

"JavaScript and Ajax" ensures that the power of Rails makes it easy to deal with JavaScript and Ajax as well as some of the common effects that you can achieve using them. "Action Mailer" shows you how to set up an application to send emails as well as responding to incoming emails. "Debugging Rails Applications" will help ease the pain of debugging an application. You will learn of the many powerful tools that Rails gives to you to combat bugs.

"Security" covers things like SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) as well as securing ports. "Performance" will help you diagnose speed problems using HTTPerf to measure your web server performance, benchmark your code, and help you figure how best to work with page caching. "Hosting and Deployment" gets you over the hump of deploying a Rails application.
"Extending Rails with Plug-ins" shows you how to extend your Rails application by installing third-party software to accomplish tasks that the Rails framework was not designed to handle. Lastly, "Graphics" will help you to upload, store and display images using a database as well as aid in generating PDF files from a variety of source data.

Rails Cookbook will guide you through the traps and pitfalls of Rails development by providing you with the building blocks of source code to make any Rails application complete. The book will be an essential addition to your programming library.