So recently Rails 3.1 was released, bringing a ton of fun new features, such as the asset pipeline, streaming, a new migration syntax, and a bunch of other new features. You may ask “hey thinkingonrails guy, how can I learn all this new stuff? There are no books out there that are cutting edge and up to date enough to help me!”

Fear not gentle reader, you’ll be happy to hear that the newly updated book from Manning Publications Rails 3 in Action is fully updated to cover Rails 3.1 (and Rails 3 if you’re even farther behind).

I was able to read through some of this book and I have to say that Ryan Bigg and Yehuda Katz did a great job in making an accessible book on rails. Yes, it definitely helps to have at least some rails (and of course ruby) experience, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably have at least a passing understanding of these things. It covers topics such as:

• Testing (early on, which is awesome)
• Nested Resources
• Authentication and authorization
• File uploads
• Email
• API design (for those wanting to go a bit beyond a blog site
• Engines
• Rack based applications

That’s not all of course, that’s just me cherry picking the table of contents. I admit I haven’t read fully all of the topics here, they are quite frankly, beyond me. The book looks great in layout as well, lots of whitespace (even @danbenjamin will approve).

I don’t want to go deep into a review and will just say this. This book hits topics that will matter in real life day to day work. Recipes such as twitter authentication and file uploads are well mixed in with a more traditional style of programming book which walks you through building an application, with successive sections building upon the previous. The writing style is fresh and feels more “conversational” (to me anyway) than other Rails books out there.

The eBook version of the book is released today and you can get a 50% off deal (that’s half price folks) for today only by using the code rails350e if you go and purchase the eBook here.

Disclosure: I was kindly given early access to the eBook by Candace over at Manning.

Related posts (maybe):

1. Rails 3 In Action Discount Code Update
2. Ruby Best Practices Full Book Available For Free
3. Three Book Recommendations From Mountain West Ruby Conf

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.