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RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) 1st Edition
Ruby on Rails is fast displacing PHP, ASP, and J2EE as the development framework of choice for discriminating programmers, thanks to its elegant design and emphasis on practical results.RailsSpace teaches you to build large-scale projects with Rails by developing a real-world application: a social networking website like MySpace, Facebook, or Friendster.
Inside, the authors walk you step by step from the creation of the site's virtually static front page, through user registration and authentication, and into a highly dynamic site, complete with user profiles, image upload, email, blogs, full-text and geographical search, and a friendship request system. In the process, you learn how Rails helps you control code complexity with the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, abstraction layers, automated testing, and code refactoring, allowing you to scale up to a large project even with a small number of developers.
This essential introduction to Rails provides
- A tutorial approach that allows you to experience Rails as it is actually used
- A solid foundation for creating any login-based website in Rails
- Coverage of newer and more advanced Rails features, such as form generators, REST, and Ajax (including RJS)
- A thorough and integrated introduction to automated testing
The book's companion website provides the application source code, a blog with follow-up articles, narrated screencasts, and a working version of the RailSpace social network.
- ISBN-100321480791
- ISBN-13978-0321480798
- Edition1st
- PublisherAddisonWesley Professional
- Publication dateJuly 20, 2007
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7 x 1.27 x 9.1 inches
- Print length537 pages
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Michael Hartl is a programmer and entrepreneur. Before discovering Rails, he used Zope/Python in a startup he cofounded to produce fantasy sports websites, including BracketManager, at the time the number one independent NCAA Basketball Tournament website. Previously, he was a physics instructor at the California Institute of Technology, where he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also served as Caltech's editor forThe Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition (Addison-Wesley). He is a graduate of Harvard College and has a Ph.D. in physics from Caltech.
Aurelius Prochazka is a pioneer of interactive, user-driven websites and has founded several companies, including Creative Internet Design, Inc., and ArsDigita Corporation. After working extensively with many operating systems and web frameworks, he happily calls Macintosh OS X and Ruby on Rails his preferred programming environments. Aurelius is the principal developer of Caltech's main website, as well as its admissions and alumni sites. He is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics from Caltech.
Product details
- Publisher : AddisonWesley Professional
- Publication date : July 20, 2007
- Edition : 1st
- Language : English
- Print length : 537 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0321480791
- ISBN-13 : 978-0321480798
- Item Weight : 1.85 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 1.27 x 9.1 inches
- Part of series : Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,616,586 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #179 inRuby Programming
- #544 inObject-Oriented Software Design
- #1,848 inObject-Oriented Design
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Michael Hartl is a physicist and entrepreneur. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Learn Enough Python to Be Dangerous and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, and was cofounder and principal author at Learn Enough (acquired 2022). He is also the founder of Tau Day and author of The Tau Manifesto. Previously, Michael taught theoretical and computational physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching and served as Caltech’s editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator entrepreneur program.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book serves as an excellent introduction to building real-world applications with Ruby on Rails. Moreover, the code quality receives positive feedback, with one customer highlighting its thought-through approach and another noting the inclusion of actual code snippets. Additionally, customers appreciate the book's interactive nature and engaging writing style.
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Customers appreciate the book's introduction to Ruby on Rails, with one customer noting it serves as an excellent learning tool that teaches through building a real-world application.
"...through this book several times and am still using itactively to learn Ruby on Rails...."Read more
"...There's lots ofuseful stuff here for what I'm doing: actual code snippets I can use, sneaky bits of syntax I might never have come across elsewhere..."Read more
"...It was a real nightmare,requiring many hours on Google and having to edit the registry (yuck!)..."Read more
"...It's a great introduction to RoR that is fun andpractical. Simply put, you construct a really simple social network with the book...."Read more
Customers appreciate the code quality in the book, with one customer highlighting its thought-through approach and another noting the inclusion of actual code snippets that can be used.
"...Michael and Aurelius are very bright and gifted educators andpretty good developers at the same time...."Read more
"...from scratch and what Rails is - and being spot on meansproviding thought-through code so you understand how the problem was approached..."Read more
"...One of the really great things is thetesting and refactoring of code...."Read more
"...to application development with RoR. It waswritten by some brilliant CalTech dudes, and it is sometimes apparent when an underlying knowledge is..."Read more
Customers find the book enjoyable to read, with one customer noting its great pace for learning and another appreciating its interactive nature.
"...It's agreat introduction to RoR that is fun and practical. Simply put, you construct a really simple social network with the book...."Read more
"...Thismakes the book interactive, easy and fun to ready and provide a great pace for learning...."Read more
"Rails Space provides anintelligent approach to RoR..."Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2008Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI have gone through this book several times and am still using it actively to learn Ruby on Rails. In my judgment, if you buy this book in conjunction with David Black's book "Ruby for Rails:..", you should be all set. Granted both books are a bit old considering that Rails 2.0.x is out, still nothing comes close in terms of the sheer usefulness from a learning point of view to these two books. I own several other Ruby and Ruby on Rails texts, but these are the two texts that I find myself frequently turning to. Initially, towards the beginning, it was David Black text, now increasingly so, it is this text.
Both Michael and Aurelius are very bright and gifted educators and pretty good developers at the same time.
I would look forward to buy another text by these two authors which takes off where this text leaves us and has been updated for Rails 2.0.x. Go for it gentlemen, I am cheering for you. - Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2011Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseShortly after starting this book, I was encountering more problems than something that is billed as easier to learn should have. So, I checked the errata page and sure enough the authors say the book is out of date (something about RESTful architecture becoming huge about six months after the book came out.) So, don't buy it if you want to learn Rails 3.0+, it will just confuse you and put you out the time and money. The same author has good information available at railstutorial.org, however, so check there.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2007Format: PaperbackMy own website is entirely hand-coded, soup to nuts. That has advantages (I get to control things entirely) and disadvantages (I have reinvented more than one wheel). I have looked at all kinds of content management systems like Drupal and so on, but have just never been ready to give up control.
It looks like Ruby on Rails just might convince me to do it. It seems to me that ROR has the right mix of freedom and ease of use, so I have been poking around here and there reading about it.
I had received this book a month or two back but accidentally buried it under a bunch of other stuff and it just surfaced this week. Good timing, because this was the week I had decided to start diving into ROR a bit deeper, and I found this very helpful in getting started.
"RailSpace" is a tutorial that leads you through building an imaginary application with ROR. I followed it on my Mac OS X Leopard, where the only difference is that Leopard uses Sqlite3 instead of MySQL as its default database. For everything but the raw database examples, it makes absolutely no difference, but you certainly can install MySQL if you want. Just to convince myself that Ruby really doesn't care I did that, and did one project with MySQL and one with the default Sqlite3 - it really makes no difference.
I liked that "RailSpace" builds its application slowly, modifying it as the chapters go along. That's an excellent way to teach, because in the real world we constantly modify our websites, adding new features, restructuring, redesigning: you might as well learn how to do that in ROR from day one, and this book takes exactly that approach.
I also liked that the authors paid attention to both looks and ease of use without clouding things up with too much detail. The project design is simple, but with enough attention paid to presentation to understand how to accomplish that in your "real" projects, and the same is true for niceties like data validation: the authors do enough to show the concepts without burying us in it.
They also included deliberate mistakes - that is, small problems which you might notice before they get around to pointing them out. That's good, because often the best way to understand WHY you need to do something this way is to see what happens when you don't.
All in all, I found this very helpful and well done. - Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2009Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseI must agree with other reviewers that this book is out-of-date. The author makes common use of things that are now deprecated in the newer versions of the software.
I have had the same problems as others with getting the project to work with MySQL. It was a real nightmare, requiring many hours on Google and having to edit the registry (yuck!) due to numerous installs/uninstalls of MySQL before I finally got things working. I am getting ready to start Chapter 4 - Registering Users. I am seriously hoping that I've gotten past all the hurdles and can start making better progress. I also agree with the reviewer who stated that he realized he'd gotten into a monkey typing mode - typing in a lot of stuff without understanding why. I think the author could have made a bit more effort to explain things in more detail, like what the bazillion files are (and what they do) that get automatically created when you first create the project.
What I do like about this book is that you learn incrementally by building a real-world application from the ground up. I don't understand why more computer programming books don't do that. I hate programming books that have a chapter on handling strings, a chapter on arrays, etc., with a few code snippets and no explanation of how it all fits together.
BTW, I am an experienced programmer (20+ years), but this is my first venture into Ruby. This the only Ruby on Rails book I've worked with, so I can't compare this book with other similar books currently on the market. - Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2007Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseBooks on coding can be spot on or way off. It entirely depends on what you are looking for.
For me, being spot on means not having to start from the very beginning - I don't want to be buying a big introduction that teaches me how to set up Rails from scratch and what Rails is - and being spot on means providing thought-through code so you understand how the problem was approached (or even identified) and why the solution is how it is. I don't want to see code I could get from any old online tutorial either - I like to see production-ready, elegant and innovative code.
This book is exactly what I was looking for in all these regards. There's lots of useful stuff here for what I'm doing: actual code snippets I can use, sneaky bits of syntax I might never have come across elsewhere, and approaches to building sites of this sort that simply save me time.
Thanks, guys!
:)
Top reviews from other countries
- Manfred StelzerReviewed in Germany on April 4, 2010
4.0 out of 5 starsSchneller Einstieg
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseDas Buch erlaubt einen sehr schnellen Einstieg in die Webprogrammierung und Rails.
Außerdem kann man damit Schritte für Schritt eine Social Networking Anwendung erstellen.
Dieses Follow step-by-step hat auch seinen Preis. Leider wird auf die Hintergründe des verwendeten Codes nur sehr knapp eingegangen
und man muß ständig im Internet hinterher recherchieren. Begleitliteratur zu Ruby und Rails ist faktisch unabdingbar.
Außderdem enthält das Buch viele Bugs. Hierfür gibt es zwar auch im Internet die Korrekturen, aber man muß ständig nachschlagen.
Viel schwerer wiegt allerdings die Tatsache, daß das Buch auf veralteten SW Versionen für Rails, Ruby und Gems beruht.
Daher sind die Code-Beispiele teilweise nicht mehr lauffähig. Auch hier kann man wieder updates für Rails 2 im Internet finden,
jedoch artet das ganze in eine ziemlich wilde Internetrecherche aus. Das Buch würde eigentlich eine neue Auflage benötigen, aber der
Autor ist längst beim nächsten Projekt (Insoshi).
Dennoch: ich bin damit innerhalb weniger Wochen von 0 auf eine 'halbe' Web-Anwendung gestartet. Mit einem Rails for Beginners wäre
ich heute noch fast bei Null. Der superschnelle Einstieg hat eben seinen Preis. 10,- für das gebrauchte Buch sind eigentlich ein
müdes Nichts dafür....
Trotz der Kritik kenne ich nichts vergleichbares. Grundsätzlich eine Supersache!!
