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Section :: books

- Format For Printing...

Rails Recipes

Seventy recipes for cooking Ruby On Rails applications...
Tuesday 26 September 2006.
 

Rails Recipes
by Chad Fowler
ISBN: 0-9776166-0-6
$32.95 / £23.50 (PDF: $21.50; combo paperback/PDF: $40.45)
Pragmatic Bookshelf: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_rr/index.html

So you’ve made a simple Rails Blog, you’ve got to grips with the basics of Ruby programming – and now you’re ready to move on to create more interesting and complex web applications. But how do you do all the important stuff like, well, add auto-completion features to help users fill in text fields semi-automatically; add internationalization support to display times and currency appropriate to the user’s geographical location; send emails with attachments from your rails application, syndicate your site’s content using and RSS feed– and so on…?

These are just a few of the things which are explained in Rails Recipes. The book is divided into seven themed chapters – User Interface recipes, Database Recipes, Controller recipes, Testing Recipes, Big-Picture Recipes and Email Recipes.

Each ‘recipe’ is described in one or more pages (the longer ones can take up to eight or so pages) each of which is divided into sections stating a) The Problem to be solved and b) The Solution – plus, in some cases, other sections such as Ingredients (such as plugins) and a Discussion of any technical details or additional options. While some of the recipes are self-contained, some of them only really make sense as part of a larger application. All the source code is downloadable in the form of an archive or around 4.6 megabytes, containing complete sample Rails applications.

This book is a great resource for a Rails developer who has already mastered the basics and wants some help to move on to bigger and better things. A word of caution, however: Rails Recipes assumes a good grounding not only in Ruby and Rails but also in much of the surrounding technologies. If you are flummoxed by HTML, CSS and JavaScript, can’t figure out how to run a web server and haven’t a clue about MySQL, this is not the book for you.

In short, if this is really a book of ‘recipes’, it is aimed at the experienced cook rather than the novice. It won’t tell you how to do the Rails equivalent of whisk an egg or bake a potato. If schemas, controllers, scripts, plugins and views mean little or nothing to you, this book will do little to shed light into the darkness. But if you are already at the stage of developing Rails apps of moderate complexity, the recipes in this book may inspire you with new ideas and time-saving solutions.

For a full list of the book’s contents see the web site.

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