Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers

Posted by Daniel Butler Wed, 03 May 2006 13:41:00 GMT

Ruby for Rails: Techniques for Rails Developers is a 528-page, 17-chapter tutorial-style book suited for a new or intermediate Rails developer seeking to gain a deeper understand—and thus more productivity—of the working of the Rails framework, as well as the more advanced and dynamic features of the beautifully expressive language that is Ruby. Using a simple Music Store application to tie the examples together, the four main sections of the book cover the following broad subject areas:

1. The Ruby/Rails Landscape includes the basics of how Ruby works, and how Rails works on top of Ruby.
2. Ruby Building Blocks includes an overview of the concepts of objects, variables, classes, modules, program organizations, the self object and scope, and control flow techniques.
3. Built-in Classes and Modules demonstrates the features of the core library, scalar objects, collections, containers, enumerations, regular expressions, and dynamic features of ruby, such as singleton classes, per-object behavior, eval, callable objects, and runtime method hooks and callbacks.
4. Using the Music Store example, Rails through Ruby, Ruby through Rails explains advanced features of inherited and automatic models capabilites, and automated features of ActiveRecord associations.

Mr. Black’s prose is clear, informative, and full of real-life experience and wisdom, and highly recommended for any new or intermediate Rails developer. David H. Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, writes in the introduction, “David clearly has an encyclopedic knowledge of Ruby. Not only does he understand how to use it, but he can also explain why things are the way they are. … This is the book that everyone coming from another language to Rails should have. To fully realize the potential of Rails, it’s crucial that you take the time to fully understand Ruby—and with Ruby for Rails David has provided just what you need to help you achieve that goal.”

Highly recommended as a comprehensive introduction to Ruby within the Rails world!

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