Rails Recipes premieres in beta book form
Posted by David February 04, 2006 @ 04:42 PM
Chad Fowler has completed the first draft of the initial 21 chapters for Rails Recipes and is now making the work available as a beta book for purchase. The final book is still a ways off, but this is an awesome opportunity to get at the very timely material right now. You need to strap on your edge shoes and get the latest Rails version off the repository for some of the recipes that rely on 1.1 features, but most of them is just about clever ways to do common things.
The great thing about Chad’s approach to these tutorials is that they are more like case studies than laundry lists of commands to input. Take the recipe to use Active Record with multiple databases. First, it sets up a complete sample mini-application to demonstrate (using best practices like migrations), then walks you through how the quick one-off hack would look like (so you understand the mechanics), then wraps everything up in a sweet External class hierarchy for ease of reuse. And then of course tops up with a recommendation that you shouldn’t really be using multiple databases unless you have no other choice and offers alternatives to avoid it.
This makes Rails Recipes useful for more than just looking up when you encounter a problem it has the solution for. It serves just as well as a teaching tool in the best practices of the framework in general and you’re likely to become a better Rails programmer by reading through all of the recipes one by one. Even if you don’t need to use multiple databases today.
So this is the perfect stepping stone after or as a companion with the Agile Web Development with Rails book. Get the first 21 recipes today and receive updates with additional recipes as they become ready. I’ll be working with Chad myself to ensure that these recipes offer as much of The Rails Way as possible and that it’ll discuss how to use all the goodies from the forthcoming Rails 1.1.
Now what are you waiting for? Go pick it up, yo.
Getting my wallet out now…
purchased… waiting for my .pdf to be generated…
count me in
How much more recipes will the final book have?
The final book is expected to get around 70 recipes.
Also keep in mind that if you get in on the beta, you have a chance of getting some recipes by request. :)
Well then. Just bought the combo pack. Does that mean I can request some form of the archetypical project a product-catalog/shopping-cart/credit-card processor? ;)
Doh! Forgot about the Depot demo in the other book. Face-palm Well a piece that doesn’t cover? ;D
I have a product-catalog/shopping-cart/cc-processor rails engine…
Are people interested in such a thing?
i’d like to request how to make the kitchen sink sink rails is “better” than java.
Seth: Sounds interesting. Would be great if you could share it with everyone—I’m sure many would find it useful.
I put in my request for a continuations/wizard recipe, would be nice to see.
How about a clean, simple way to do authentication with maybe an alternate/second recipe on how to expand that to a more robust scheme (with ACL’s or something like that). Currently the wiki area dealing with authentication is a confusing mess.
Heh, spoke too soon. I was waiting for the system to generate my book… authentication’s already in there!
Excellent. Just purchased my combo pack. Looking forward to this one very much as I just finished my initial run through the Agile book and was very pleased with it. Should be a great next step book.
Nice for the posssibily of requests, Chad. Just got it, only a 9 minute wait after ordering.
just beautyfull!! waiting for updates!!
thanks to the authors for the book and editor to allow pdf purchase, it’s really usefull for us in Europe/Asia to avoid waiting weeks to start working!
BTW, a multilingual website recipe would be highly desired (I18N, localization, UTF8…)
thanks to the authors for the book and editor to allow pdf purchase, it’s really usefull for us in Europe/Asia to avoid waiting weeks to start working!
BTW, a multilingual website recipe would be highly desired (I18N, localization, UTF8…)
Sorry for the form submitted twice…
<u>it’ll discuss how to use all the goodies from the forthcoming Rails 1.1</u>Where can we find more information about 1.1 new features? I’ve seen nothing
I’d second the request for an I18N recipe!
I think along with email it might be a good thing to cover RSS. How to generate feeds, how to import RSS feeds for use in rails. I’m know there are some libraries out there but I’m sure there are some spiffy RSS topics that could be covered and would be relevant to a range of different developers.
Just bought my copy:) I will third the I18N recipe :)
A recipe on full text searches? With Ferret? With Rast?
I bought it like an hour after it was released—great stuff! I’m using it already.
I’d like to see a comprehensive tutorial on how to use HABTM with acts_as_list and more on how to use the edit in place stuff.
I bought it like an hour after it was released—great stuff! I’m using it already.
I’d like to see a comprehensive tutorial on how to use HABTM with acts_as_list and more on how to use the edit in place stuff.
please i18N stuff, thanks
Another i18N/l10n request. Thanks.
i18n/l10n here as well.
Perhaps a recipe on has_many :through would be nice as well
Great! Was just looking for the thing … bought it right away.
I am very interested in book.my question is how to get the beta version book.
Thanks
I’m definitely going to be buying this. I’d like to see a recipe describing a way to create a page that lets you edit HABTM mappings, for example, if you have a products table and a categories table and want a product edit page that includes all the categories with checkboxes (more or less automatically) and also handles receiving the data correctly.
I’m definitely going to be buying this. I’d like to see a recipe describing a way to create a page that lets you edit HABTM mappings, for example, if you have a products table and a categories table and want a product edit page that includes all the categories with checkboxes (more or less automatically) and also handles receiving the data correctly.
Ah, and a recipe to prevent dupe posts due to the page not updating would be nice ::wink wink::
It would be great to have recipes showing how to integrate rails with popular APIs such as Amazon, PayPal, Google Maps etc.
oh. another book, still no real docs.
what is this, scientology?
On my way to the store as we speak. That didn’t make sense since I’m writing. Damn…