Cool stuff, Rails Tutorial.org has been updated to support Rails 4.0. This is great news as the rails tutorial site is the first place I tend to send people who are interested in learning rails. Great stuff from Michael!
Manning books contacted me today to update about the Rails 3 in Action book that I reviewed last month. There are new discount codes available. Use the discount code rails337 for a 37% discount if you purchase it over at the Manning site.
I received a hard copy of the book yesterday from my contact at Manning and I have to say it’s a great looking book, and satisfyingly heavy 
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:
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.
Been a bit busy the last couple of days, I have a great post on Rails podcasts sitting chambered and ready to be formatted and have images added, and I’ll post that tonight. The last couple of lunch hours I’ve taken a bit of my own advice and have been hiding in the lunch room and reading through The Pickaxe Book and 4 chapters in I’m glad I am. It’s nice to get back to basics and go back and examine some of the principles that I’m using in more detail, as a lot of the time when I’m doing rails coding I really don’t know what’s going on down in the core of Ruby that may have to do with inheritance, class methods, and so on.
A while back I spent a fair amount of time with the Pro Active Record book, learning all about dynamic finders, associations, validations, and all the other magic it has, sometimes it was a bit of a pain to set everything up by hand, typing out the .rb model files, creating the databases, etc. I figured, why do all that work (yea yea, I know it’s just typing out some text) when you have the power of rails, generators and rake at your disposal. So what I’d do is simply use the rails generators.
$ rails test && cd test [...] $ script/generate model User name:string age:integer [...] $ rake db:create && rake db:migrate $ vi app/models/user.rb # optional $ script/console |
Voila! Four commands and you’re in an interactive shell that will let you manipulate your models, add data, run finds, etc. No need to deal with anything other than an already set up database and model file, and you have a nice interactive shell to boot.
Best part? Just do an “rm -rf <directory>” when you’re done to nuke the directory and either start again or try out the next experiment.
Ruby Best Practices – Full Book Now Available For Free!
That about says it all! Kudos to the author for doing this, and please donate and support him!
