Ezra's book delivers precious info to every developer interested into Rails applications deployment. Staring from an hardcore-developer point of view maybe the book might had been condensed by eliminating some not-so-useful topics, such as the first chapters about hosting options. Furthermore cloud-computing it's never mentioned. Anyway it remains the only authorative reference about one of the Achilles' heel of the Rails framework.

I guess because this book was anticipated for so long, the expectation were a bit high. In the mean time I've read loads of information to setup a server on the internet.

Best chapters for me were 8. Scaling out (MySQL clustering was new and interesting) and 9. Performance where you go from a solid base line to the best number of mongrels for your server.

This is a superb book, the best compact writeups i've seen on setting up Apache load balancing and proxies, nginx, mongrel, SVN server and repos, DNS, MySql caching, capistrano, rake, profiling apps (and there's a lot of blogs, books on these subjects. Entire mailing lists, in fact). Compact means they don't go into every option or configuration conceivable, you get everything (to almost 2 sigma) you need to know to get it going reliably, scalably, loggably, plus a lot of hard-won knowledge about what can go wrong. Just not quite the detail they go into, in, say the Frisch and Nemeth/Snyder/Hein unix admin books. I think for a lot of people (many java or PHP devs don't have to worry about the infrastructure of their production boxes, they had STDIFT (somebody to do it for them), this is a must have.

This book isn't perfect. What it covers it covers beautifully, what it doesn't cover, well, it kinda slows down to 30 MPH for a red light. Witness pp 234-5: covers nested sets, STI, indexes and normalization, AR duck typing, polymorphic associations. Geez, that's a lotta topics for slightly less than 1 page. Well, they're outside the scope of this treatment and there aren't a lot of references given. What about all the Yslow stuff that everybody's talking about: JS /CSS compression/lazy loading, CDN, reduce DNS lookups. Some topics are here, some aren't. Basically, that's what you worry about after you've dug thru logfiles and profiled, topics this book covers in excellent depth.

There are a few editing/editorial slips. 3 authors flip-flop between debian/ubuntu & RH/centOS/FC families (and don't talk about FreeBSD /solaris). Page 92 seems to suggest the default Leopard ruby install is fine. p 212: they're comparing a ubuntu, single CPU machine against a 2-cpu, windows machine running ??. I figure the editor should have said "huh?". and p 172 they write a lot about mySQL clustering limitations, when they could've talked about postgres instead of/in addition to.

But really with stuff they could've written about, we're talking about a 600 page book, not this 250 page book with nice margins, easy to read fonts. So that' s my story and i'm sticking to it.

I buy a lot of books, mostly Ruby and Rails books. Most of them are follow-me guides that don't explain anything. Sure, ya did it, but you don't know why. Not this one. Ezra Zygmuntowicz actually explains how it works, why you need to do it and then, how to do it. And few people know as much about deployment.
This is an extremely well written, "must have" reference.

TW Scannell