Review: Rails Recipies
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it. Coffee for example, is good in moderation - but even if your are a javaholic, you can overdo it. It was a shiney new Nespresso machine that delivered ths lesson for me. Having received it for Christmas I scuttled back to my city center pad for a St. Stephens day of coding and quaffing. The coding was my first forray into the world of Ruby on Rails programming. As a Java/php developer there was a lot to learn. Armed with 10 nespresso capsules and Rails Recipies I embarked on an epic 48hr codefest. This wasn’t a voluntary 48hr immersion. Ten nespresso capsules can pretty much annihilate any hope of a decent nights sleep or as it turns out - the following nights sleep either.
This did mean however that I got under the hood fast and managed to tear through a goodly number of the patterns in the book. This is a book aimed at the ruby competent programmer. There is no syntax introduction and it rather focuses on patterns and plugins available for use. As I wasn’t a competent ruby programmer - this meant there was a lot of experimentation going on. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t in kansas anymore and this strange new world was populated with weird and wonderful approaches to everything from scoping to iterating. On the plus side this means it gives you a great set of useful tools you can start playing with right away.
No ‘hello world’ here. It was much closer to ‘user authentication’ or ‘adding embedded logging’. As a complete ruby novice this proved to be a bit of a challange. Not least coming from the statically typed, c’esque world of Java. As there was no coverage of rubys language features and this resulted in me doing some basic research on the net before I was able to tackle the examples. Having done this whoever, I found the book really enjoyable. The patterns provided are really useful - and provide you with all the know-how to create a leading or even bleading edge web application. There are six sections in the book (User Interface Recipes, Database Recipes, Controller Recipes, Big Picture Recipes and Email Recipes). As I page through my dog-eared copy of the book I realise that I only really scraped the surface of the examples provided.
I set about created a basic CRM web-app for my local business networking group. In that process I implemented the ‘Autocomplete textfield’, ‘Creating Drag and Drop Sortable Lists’, ‘Creating Pretty Graphs’, ‘Self-referential Many-to-many Relationships’, ‘Tagging content’, ‘Authenticating your users’, ‘Authorizing Users with Roles’ and ‘Send Gracefull Degrading Rich-Content Emails’.
Every problem I came up across when implementing the web-app seemed to have a chapter dedicated to it in the Recipies book. I was really impressed. Each chapter was well-layed out provided all the necessary goey detail to get going. The only problem I came across was with the graphic chapter as I didn’t manage to get RMagick installed correctly.
In summary - its fair to say I have yet to come across a more useful programming book. You could probably save yourself a good bit of time by becoming familiar with Ruby as a language and even the Rails framework before you invest. Probably the best thing about the book is it lays out practical ways to implement good practice (such as testing and continuous integration techniques) in a down to earth fashion. If you don’t have it - get it!
