Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce
Posted by David November 13, 2006 @ 04:04 AM
Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine’s new book has hit the shelves: Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce. Their pitch:
Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is the first book of its kind to guide you through producing e-commerce applications with Rails—the stacked web framework taking the world by storm. The book dives right into the process of creating a production-level web application using agile methodologies and test-driven development combined with Rails best practices. You’ll take advantage of the latest crop of Rails plug-ins and helpers that will radically improve your programming schedule. You’ll also create a real application step-by-step, plus the book is driven by real-world cases throughout.
You can also get it straight from Amazon. Congratulations to both authors on completing the book.
Awesome. More books never hurts!
But won’t the dell guy disagree with “Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional is the first book of its kind to guide you through producing e-commerce applications with Rails” ?
Is it terrible that these days I hardly ever consier a book if it’s not available in PDF form?
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been up for 48 hours straight programming a rails app that makes me yield such odd assertions ;-)
(http://www.sydneyflutefestival.com.au/)
Ah… I fully love Rails.
The Random8r (http://www.coretech.net.au/)
From a post the other day, I started reading a bit about the semantic web… is this a train you’re gonna jump onto anytime soon, DHH?
Random8r, it is available as a PDF. Go take a look at the Apress page.
Also, if you’re interested, I’ve posted an interview I did with Jarkko about the book over here:
http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/2006/11/author-interview-jarkko-laine.html
random8r, I never say never, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for any time soon ;)
Does anyone have experience with Apress eBooks? Are they flexible? Is it just a PDF with a password on it or are there other restrictions?
Congrats to the authors. I’m eager to get a look at the book.
I got this book last week and have already read most of it. Wrote a glowing review for Amazon, but they haven’t approved it. Do I have a sailor’s mouth?
Anyway, it’s great. It covers far, far more than Ben Curtis’ book. In particular, it focuses on TDD, in a way that no other Rails book does, which is great. It goes into specifics, also, showing you how to actually process a payment with Authorize.net! Very good.
Kudos to both authors. I would recommend this book to just about anyone who is not already a Rails expert.
Sean, the Apress PDFs are just a password-protected PDF (password is the email you provide during the purchase process). No restrictions other than that. Please let me know if you have any other questions (jasonATapress.com).
Jason
Does it cover Substruct or Shopify?
rails sux & ya webs broken in ie7
download a real browser…
Great book thus far, especially the TDD/user story approach, but the eBook (PDF) leaves something to be desired.
There is no linked TOC, bookmarks just go to chapters in Reader and don’t even show in Mac Preview, URLs aren’t linked, nor is the index. (Hint, hint, nudge, nudge… to JasonATapress).
Apress should take a look at the Pragmatic Programmer’s PDF’s; they’re doing it right.
If I already bought the dead tree edition, can I get the PDF for free/reduced?
I too interesting “If I already bought the dead tree edition, can I get the PDF for free/reduced?” Azazelo Blog
What does this book offer that other books do not already offer? I am reading Agile Web Development with Rails—Second Edition. The first edition got me started on Rails. But now there are so many that finally coming out. I am looking for a book taht finally offers something different. Especially, with all the exciting development in Edge Rails and other nice plugins. Those are often not featured in these books.
Seedang.com
Jon: Ben Curtis’ ebook is great but it’s not a project-oriented hands-on book. It is a collection of short recipes you can use when you mostly know how to build an e-Commerce site. It covers some very advanced topics, but also very briefly, so you need to know your Rails well to get the most out of it. That said, I highly recommend it as a companion for our book ;-)
Raymond: Thanks for your kind words.
Kevin: There are instructions at the back of the book of how to get a significant discount of the PDF.
Moodang: We’re covering the use of quite a few plugins that are relevant for the book, including Globalize, Selenium on Rails, Active Merchant, acts_as_ferret, and many more. You can read the whole TOC at http://www.railsecommerce.com
I am a hobbyist programmer and do not depend upon programming for a living or have lots of training or experience except in basic scripting languages. I bought this book. I have all the others too I think. AWDWR, Ruby for Rails, Rails Recipes, and several others including the O’Reilly PDFs on web services and RJS. Most have been pretty good on one or another aspect of programming Rails. Others have changed the way I program or think about designing or going about an application.
For example, I remember the first time I read the Apple article on Rails that I think Mike Clark wrote. After reading that I said, Oh, so that’s why migrations are so useful.
I had the same feeling for test driven development and this book. Now I can see why I’ll write tests that fail first and then I’ll write code to get it to pass. It just made TDD seem very practical.
It also covers some plugins that I’ve thought about using but was a little intimidated by. Not anymore. I now use acts_as_ferret and have plans for acts_as_authenticated and globalize. I had been doing some of this on my own, but there are situations where the plugins will be real time savers.
Just got the book today from Amazon. Looks great, a lot of tests and concrete examples. I am glad to see books integrating common plugins and how to use them. These types of texts will help take rails to a broader base of users and hopefully inspire even more interesting plugins and useful tools. The localization chapter looks particularly interesting for those rails developers looking to write more internationally flavored sites.
I hate to be a troll, but this book is just flat out not very good. I think it gets positive press just because it’s “a rails book”, and there just arn’t that many rails books around yet (compared to say, java).
The flaw with this book is quite simple, it tries to do too much. I didnt buy this book to learn SCRUM or how to write migrations. I didnt buy this book to learn TDD or how to use the code generators. I bought this book to read about using rails specifically for e-commerce.
If you want to write abook to teach all those things, the book would be thousands of pages long, yet this book is only ~450 pages. What this means is that the author glazes over things that should have detail, and in some cases, goes into details where he should glaze over (because the topic isn’t realy ecommerce specific).
As far as i can tell, less than half the book is really dealing specifically with ecommerce, in fact most of the book falls under the category of generic rails development. The store application that is built is almost identical to the one that is built in the AWDWR book, with the exception that the author includes SOME details about card processing. I say SOME, because the book definitly left me scratching my head a few times and referring to other sources.
IMHO you’d be much better off if you just bought AWDWR and the “Payment Processing with paypal and ruby” PDF “friday” from the pragmatic programmers. You’ll end up with more focused reference material with all the details you need to actually implement the necassary components.
If you want to learn SCRUM or TDD, there are books for those topics too, and you’d be better off buying a “focused” reference.