Book Review: Ruby for Rails

If you’ve just picked up Agile Web Development with Rails and Rails is as far as your Ruby knowledge goes then this book is perfect for you if you’d like to know a bit more and can’t see yourself using Ruby outside of Rails anytime soon.
Under no other circumstances should you buy this book! None! If you’ve read Pickaxe or Why’s Guide look away now!

My experience with this book started with skimming to final section, glossing-over 3/4 of the book that discuss the design of Rails and trivial Ruby. It shamelessly goes as low as you can, touching conditionals and inheritance.
On the bright side, the final section at least has Rails code snippets. It stresses the value of delegating responsibility to the model and writing thin controllers and efficient queries among other things. While it’s sound advice, it’s not ground-breaking stuff - more common knowledge for the experienced dev.
The final chapter offering advice on exploring the innards of Rails is another good example of this, it discusses 3 techniques:

• Randomly scrounge around the source.
• Scrounge around in a targeted manner. If you’re looking for ActiveRecord stuff, target the ActiveRecord classes like ActiveRecord::Base.
• Consult the doco.

Phew! Where would I be without that advice!

So again, if you’re a Ruby dummy and want to know more to make a nicer Rails app, then consider this book. On the whole the book smells of a sales and marketing ploy targeting the current hit topic. Don’t be fooled, like I was, that this book covers complex Ruby. At the minute I can’t see how Ruby could be that complex.