Practical Rails Projects

Sean Cribbs writes "There are many beginning and advanced Ruby on Rails books available, from the authoritative Agile Web Development with Rails to the cookbook-style Rails Recipes. However, healthy guidance for intermediate-level developers is lacking at best. Ironically, this is the most crucial stage in the process of becoming proficient with Rails because one must begin to learn why, not just how. Eldon Alameda's Practical Rails Projects effectively fills that gap. I know Alameda from our local Ruby User Group and spoke with him frequently while he wrote this book. His expertise with Rails definitely shines through in the hefty 621-page volume." Keep reading for the rest of Sean's review.

Practical Rails Projects
author	Eldon Alameda
pages	621
publisher	Apress
rating	8/10
reviewer	Sean Cribbs
ISBN	978-1-59059-781-1
summary	A strong book for the intermediate Rails developer

Practical Rails Projects has a unique and effective approach. Instead of spoon-feeding contrived code snippets, Alameda teaches by example, leading the reader step-by-step through the design, creation, enhancement, and analysis of several full-fledged projects. Each project introduces new techniques to the intermediate Rails developer carefully and with plenty of explanation — from caching to generating graphs to RESTful application design and much more. Rather than regurgitating documentation that is occasionally unclear or misleading, each application begins with a clean Rails project and is built up step-by-step with detailed commentary on how and why each step is taken. Alameda's format reflects the reality that real-life projects never have a straight development path; at each step one must make tough decisions, watch for pitfalls and take risks. There are no leaps-of-faith or "just trust me" moments, everything is explained. In the final chapter of each project, Alameda also suggests ways that the project could be improved and how to apply the newly learned techniques to previous projects in the book.

The text is clear and uncomplicated with an approachable style. Projects even makes Rails' least fun framework, ActionWebService (which helps you create SOAP and XML-RPC services), easy to understand. While there are some glaring proofing mistakes, such as "Ruby" uncapitalized and some malformed URLs to external resources, the code snippets are practically error-free and all source and binary resources are available via the Apress website.

One controversial decision made by Alameda was to use the ExtJS Javascript library extensively in one project to build an administration interface for a legacy site. ExtJS is a powerful high-level library that simplifies the creation of desktop-like interfaces in the web browser. Instead of spending a lot of time hand-crafting HTML/ERb templates and CSS, Alameda quickly creates an interface in ExtJS and uses Rails to generate XML and JSON that drives the almost entirely client-side application. While some may find this outside the spectrum of what should be in a Rails book, many developers are now creating their interfaces in Flex, SilverLight, and other client-side technologies. With the recent official release of ActiveResource, I believe we will see more web-service-focused Rails applications as time goes on. Alameda's choice is also practical; with a small number of users having access to the interface, he can place greater requirements on them in order to deliver the application more quickly.

Overall, I believe Practical Rails Projects is a strong book for the intermediate Rails developer. It provides an introduction to more advanced concepts of the framework without being preachy or obtuse. It lacks any discussion of test- or behavior-driven development with Rails, but the breadth and depth of the topics it covers makes up for this weakness. Like any book that covers a rapidly-changing open-source project like Ruby on Rails, Projects will date quickly, but in the near-term it should be of great help to developers looking to gain constructive experience.

You can purchase Practical Rails Projects from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Here it goes

[Joseph1337]

Bad scaling/'right for the right job' flames in: 3.. 2.. 1..

Re:

[fishdan]

Yep rails for any thing where you don't expect traffic, MackFramework [mackframework.com] if you want to run something that will handle the /. effect.

Mack Framework

[vp_development]

Although I agree the MackFramework has the most potential of the 87 web frameworks that want to surplant Rails, it's not ready for Prime Time yet. In a couple of months, maybe, but for right now, I'd still use Rails for a professional project.

Re:

[Marc_Loriau]

sure thing. - Marc Loriau

621 pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it come with its own set of rails and a freight train to transport the book around?

Practical Rails Projects

[everphilski]

- constructing railroad tracks
- fencing material
- structural support for a building

I converted our corporate site from PHP to RoR

[Anonymous Coward]

and all I got was a pinkslip

Re:

[tcopeland]

> and all I got was a pinkslip

You should have used modrails [modrails.com]. Suddenly, Rails deployment is as easy as PHP deployment. I no longer hesitate to put up little toy apps [infoether.com] since now I don't have to worry about mongrel clusters and init scripts and all that rot. Great stuff!

Huh?

[Jane Q. Public]

Do you find configuring Mongrel Clusters (usually just a command-line switch or two) difficult? Strange, nobody else seems to. And I am also curious: why do your "little toy apps" need init scripts in the first place?

Re:

[tcopeland]

> why do your "little toy apps" need init scripts in the first place?

Because I want them to start if the machine gets restarted.

And?

[Jane Q. Public]

And you find this a difficult thing to do? Maybe you are in the wrong profession.

So you worked yourself out of a job, eh?

[Jane Q. Public]

They probably just don't need you anymore, now that it's in Rails. :O)

Objective?

[Harold Halloway]

"I know Alameda from our local Ruby User Group and spoke with him frequently while he wrote this book."

I would be a bit worried that this review might not totally objective or unbiased.

Re:

[maxume]

Is there somewhere where it promises to be objective and unbiased, or is there some text disclosing the reviewer's connection to the author?

Upon seeing the headline "Mother loves, praises Child", Harold interjected "How do we know we can trust her opinion?"

Re:

[Microsift]

Dude, he only gave him an 8/10!

Informative?

[Microsift]

I was shooting for funny...

Re:Objective?

[Sean Cribbs]

I did my best to review the book honestly. All I can give you is my word.

Re:

[Harold Halloway]

Yes and you were honest enough to disclose the relationship so in retrospect my original comment was a bit churlish.

[OT] Re:Objective?

[slackergod]

I'm sorry, what? Of course there's an objective view.

I agree with you re: the biasing tendencies/constraints inherently present in human physiology, as well human (group) psychology.

But of _course_ there's an objective viewpoint.
It's the viewpoint which accurately reflects all things which can be accurately measured.
Most things which seem to be subjectively reported are mainly so because no metric exists or is being used which can measure the objectivity.

Math, most glaring of all, is objective. No one can h

Re:

[maxume]

2 + 2 = 4 is probably objective, but -2 * -2 = 4 probably isn't.

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

No, what you saw was almost certainly model validation, which is pure Ruby and built into Rails. There is no ajax involved at all, even though it may look that way.

Already out of date?

[khendron]

This book was published in October, 2007, and Rails 2.0 was released December, 2007. According to the description on Amazon, only the last example deals with 2.0 at all.

Since there were some rather significant changes introduced in Rails 2.0, it is likely that many of the examples will no longer work as described. I know that is the case with current version Agile Web Development with Rails.

Re:

[Sean Cribbs]

Such is the pace of a popular framework like Rails. I submitted this review to /. over 2 months ago, and yet another release of Rails is imminent. A paper-based publishing process just can't keep up.

Re:

[nem75]

A paper-based publishing process just can't keep up.

In that case one might argue the sense in reading said publishings.

Re:Already out of date?

[Sam Ruby]

it is likely that many of the examples will no longer work as described. I know that is the case with current version Agile Web Development with Rails.

I guess that would depend on your definition of current. There is a new version in beta [pragprog.com] that has already been largely updated, and continues to actively follow Rails development.

Disclaimer: with this edition, I was recruited to be one of the authors of this book.

Re:

[prog-guru]

I was thinking the same thing, in particular ActionWebService has been replaced by ActiveResource, and much of the controller/routing code seems to cater to REST URLs.

Rails docs could use the help

[ClientNine]

I've found that Rails documentation falls into two categorys: (1) The annoyingly pedantic tutorial which falls apart if anything whatsoever goes wrong on your system, since the tutorial lacks any depth; and (2) Advanced docs that are moderately impenetrable to people not already very familiar with the relevant technologies.

I'm an experienced Perl and C guy who just wants to find a better way than CGI::Ajax to build slick web applications, but I found that I spent more time being annoyed with the documentation than actually learning. Intermediate indeed; Rails needs this.

Re:

[mini me]

The documentation is fine. There are just no good code examples out there for people to learn from. That is what Rails needs.

Re:

[mini me]

If I want to learn how to do something, I want to see code not read about it. I know one issue that stumps a lot of people is how to handle multiple models with one form. The best way to show how to properly handle that situation is to have a sample application in front of you that implements multiple models with one form.

However, these code examples do not belong in the documentation. The documentation is where I go to figure out what I should expect when I pass a certain attribute to a method. Learning ho

Rails Project

[slashflood]

Another practical Rails book that I can recommend is RailsSpace [railsspace.com].
Shameless plug: my latest Rails project [howflow.com]. To give you an idea how powerful Rails is, HowFlow has been developed in exaclty five days from scratch. It is currently in private beta, but I'm handing out invitations for those who send an email to flow at howflow.com.

RailsSpace seconded

[IdahoEv]

I will second RailsSpace.

I tried learning rails from Agile Web Development with Rails first, and I found that AWDwR has a huge deficiency: it frequently fails to explain the fundamental Ruby concepts and structures that it's using. (For example, I remember typing in the :symbol syntax for several chapters without having any idea what it actually was.).

RailsSpace, OTOH, does a really good job of stopping to explain each new concept, tool, or syntax in a sidebar; as a coder who didn't already know Ruby I fou

Re:

[tcopeland]

> it frequently fails to explain the fundamental
> Ruby concepts and structures that it's using.

David Black's Ruby For Rails [manning.com] is a great book for this; David explains the way Rails leverages all sorts of Ruby techniques to do what it does. Another good one is Advanced Rails [oreilly.com], which has an excellent section on the changes that Rails makes to various Ruby core classes - e.g., Symbol.to_proc.

Newer book for intermediate-advanced developers

[Anonymous Coward]

The Art of Rails [amazon.com] covers intermediate Rails topics quite nicely, and just came out so it had the chance to cover some of the Rails 2.0 developments (particularly related to nested routes and REST services). I've been reading through a copy and have found it really helpful so far -- especially the three chapters on advanced Ruby development patterns.

Wheres the projectile??

[Tmack]

Anyone else read the title wondering why "gun" was left out?

My second thought was, why is /. covering trains?

THEN I remembered that Ruby decided to name their framework with that term...

tm

Please keep up.

[Jane Q. Public]

That was an old rumor, and Twitter is on record correcting these misapprehensions. Their problems were NOT due to Rails, and they have NO plans to switch away from Rails.

Re:

[prog-guru]

I've heard the same (.NET has Microsoft, J2EE has Sun). I was hoping it would be Apple for rails, since they were shipping it with their new OS, but that didn't seem to happen.

Re:

[mini me]

I am no longer a Ruby on Rails fan as I have found more and more people complain about scalability.

Which is silly because Rails scales exactly the same way every shared nothing web architecture does. If you're application won't scale in Rails, it won't scale if you rewrote it in PHP, or even C for that matter.

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

Scalability is not so much an issue. Finding people who know how to scale properly is.

Most of the people complaining about scalability are complaining because it does NOT (contrary to what the other poster wrote) scale the same way others do. It takes some learning to know how to scale Rails applications properly. If you try to do it the same way you scale applications running under Apache, for example, you probably won't get very far.

In part that is because Rails is (still but maybe not for long) sin

Re:

[mini me]

If you try to do it the same way you scale applications running under Apache, for example, you probably won't get very far.

I disagree. Sure, the configuration may be different, but ultimately, in simplistic terms, no matter what your framework/language you just keep adding processes and servers until you've met your load requirements. There is nothing in Rails that forces you to keep your application on a single server, for example.

NONSENSE

[Jane Q. Public]

You don't know what you are talking about. Rails is not thread-safe. If you want to run multiple instances of Rails, you had BETTER run them in different processes, or you are going to blow yourself up. Which means: EVERY instance of Rails must run under its own web (not physical) server. If you are doing it differently, you are fucking up.

Now, allowing for the possibility that you meant something other than what I thought, I will state that Apache works best with multiple-threading applications. You can

Re:

[tcopeland]

> I am no longer a Ruby on Rails fan as I have found
> more and more people complain about scalability.

Remember, languages (and frameworks) don't scale, architectures do.

> There have been numerous companies that have abandoned ship.

From where I stand there are lots of companies getting onboard, and modrails [modrails.com] is a sea change (for the better!) in the Rails deployment story.

Re:

[Jane Q. Public]

I would want to see some solid numbers before I bought into the mod_rails thing. Sure, it might let Rails applications use less memory, but you have to be running Apache, which is relatively large in itself.

Also, historically, Rails apps running under Apache have not been very fast or efficient.

So this is one to which I say, "I'll believe it when I see it, not before."

Re:

[tcopeland]

> So this is one to which I say, "I'll believe it when I see it, not before."

Yup, that's fair enough. But I hope that I've opened port ranges and set up init scripts and monit.conf files and mongrel_cluster.yml and proxy_balancer settings for the last time. No more need to worry about a dozen people doing slow file uploads and locking all the Mongrel processes... all those pieces of the puzzle just go away. Good times.

Since when

[Jane Q. Public]

has "one size fits all" actually worked??

Sure, okay, it fits you just fine. But I doubt it would fit me, or a lot of others I know.

Practical Rails Projects?

[rk]

You can buy this book for cheap in electronic format. Newegg has them [newegg.com], 100 copies on DVD for 24.99. and free three day shipping.

I keed, I keed. Relax! Hey you, RoR fans with the mod points! Put those back down!

Ruby rocks, rails, meh

[lifebouy]

After playing around with ruby on rails, I just didn't find that it was all that useful. Mostly I found it was just a painful exercise in learning exotic ways of doing things that I already knew how to do correctly. SQL, for example. Don't get me wrong, I see some merit in the rails way of doing things, but overall rails just seems like two steps back for anyone savvy enough to comprehend ruby in the first place.
Ruby, on the other hand, rocks out loud.

Re:

[pmee]

Convention over configuration and ActiveRecord are hardly exotic. I must admit I loved it when I discovered the Dynamic finders.

Then you probably do not "get" it.

[Jane Q. Public]

I did not "get" Rails at first either. But now that I am familiar with it, I can do things in moments that it used to take half a day programming to do.

True, there is strong incentive to "go with the flow", and learn the "Rails Way" to do things... but most of the time that actually helps rather than hinders.

Re:

[Pengo]

I bounced back and forth like this for a while. I'm a 10 year Java vet, it's served me well in that the Java+Linux server programing duopoly has allowed me to live in some cool place, and allowed my family a great lifestyle.

I remember facing the same question back when, "should I keep forging ahead with PHP or give this Java thing a try". Looking back, thank god I gave Java a fair shake. Even though my first major project could of been done probably a lot easier in PHP, it was worth it's time in gold, bi

Re:

[mini me]

ActiveRecord doesn't do SQL "correctly" for very good reasons. If you have a reason why you need to use SQL like it was designed, you probably shouldn't be using ActiveRecord at all. However, that does not preclude you from using the rest of the Rails framework.