Dave Thomas, et al.
I’m a little late catching the bandwagon, but I didn’t buy the (beta)book for a few weeks after it’s release. This is a spectacularly detailed book on the rails framework, capturing the simplicity of setting up a rails application in it’s tutorial followed by quite a dense summary of the different aspects of rails quite in depth.
I like how rails is so simple. I can start a project and get a great amount done, and I hardly know a thing about programming. The more in depth sections of the book were tough reading for me – the two in depth sections on active record almost all went over my head the first time I read them.
I’m not complaining, I love that the book introduces topics more complicated then the average rails tutorial does. It’s also nice to have all the material in the same book. Rails has needed an authoritative overview for awhile. The rails documentation always helps with problems you know about, but doesn’t give the high level view that the rails book does.
I was really looking for a widening of my horizons – not how to do the things I already know how to do in rails but what is there that I don’t know anything about yet that I can learn? AWDR (when will it get a name, like pickaxe?) in the later chapters revealed a few things, but I think what it will really take to get to the level I want with rails is thumbing the framework source code. Maybe one of the next few rails books will help with that too.
But its still a great reference, and I expect that whenever I’m having trouble with rails it will be nice to have standing on my desk (I can’t wait for it to ship, programming book #2).