If you're contemplating or actually building a social-networking website in Rails this book is worth buying. You can learn a lot by going through it from start to finish, or just take a gander at the chapter(s) that concern you.
Alan writes well and you get a chance to see how things are done in the real world as opposed to a tutorial.
If your site is social-network related, I also recommend RailsSpace. These two books should give you a great head-start or the final answer on any "How do I do that"? type of question.

I recently read four books on Ruby on Rails so I could ramp up on this super new framework quickly. Past experience has taught me that four books will result in at least one gem, and a dud. This one was the dud. The gem was RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) - which also teaches ROR through building a social networking site. I will review RailsSpace on its Amazon page.

Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment.

The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails' testing framework are introduced as they're used. The style isn't test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance.

Judicious use is made of plugins with a number of recommendations made throughout the book. restful_authentication is referred to, but its functionality is largely duplicated in the code. That's probably a sensible move so early in the book as it's important that developers understand what the code is doing even if they're going to employ a plugin for the implementation. YM4R/GM is used to implement the Google Maps functionality and it's good to see that getting some attention in print.

Readers who have already built a couple of rails apps may well find themselves skipping large chunks of content as a lot of the code will be familiar. As other reviewers have noted, it is a little curious that "The Apress Roadmap" suggests this as a more advanced title when it would probably work better for an engaged beginner than an experienced developer.

Of course, the great problem with publishing any rails title right now is that version 2.0 is just around the corner, and with its release we'll see the end of built-in pagination and a few changes to the routes. As a consequence there are likely to be a number of readers who find that the examples in the book fail to run on the latest stable rails by the time they come to try them. Hopefully Apress will be able to offer a brief supplement with the book or online to help readers update the code for the new features.

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a solid introduction illustrating how simple it can be to build useful web applications with Ruby on Rails. I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone with rails experience, but it will be high on my list of recommendations for beginners who are wanting to dive straight in.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

I've purchased almost every Ruby on Rails book that Amazon sells as I am forced to be 'self taught' and thus must 'slug through' every book. This book is a godsend! Alan Bradburne's book is some of the finest and cleanest code I have witnessed and his approach to this book is fine. Unfortunately, I also purchased the RailsSpace - Building a Social Networking Website and this was conversely TERRIBLE. No RESTful routes, lack of direction on where they intended to go, etc.
I heartidly recommend anyone that has to really produce a working product in Rails purchase this fine book and 'Hat's off!' to Alan Bradburne.

Great book. It's specific enough that it can be used to develop, as the title suggests, social networking sites, but it's also a modular enough approach that it's feasible to fit the examples into a wider framework, such as adding social networking features to an existing site.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I write books for Apress, who publishes this title. I didn't write *this* book, though, and I don't know the author.)

David Berube
Berube Consulting