This book is half-baked and needs to go back to the kitchen. Critical instructions are missing (even in the first chapter) and are often misleading or ambiguous. I did a lot of guess work to get through the first chapter. I will return this book in few hours.

I disagree with the other negative reviews and I am finding this book to be an excellent starter choice.

I'm a java guy needing to quickly move to rails. I'm finding the choice of topics and the simple direct examples to be very effective. I am focused on trying to understand the framework dynamics and have looked at several other volumes, which maybe are more complete and detailed, but were not as helpful in getting going.

Here's some examples: page 182: "We need to type parameters our methods require and values they return because Ruby is a loosely typed language" "Yield is a variable" (in layouts). "REST web services are simply GET and POST requests". And it goes on and on.

In addition, the layout of the book makes it very difficult to read. Text, code and screenshots are just kind of slopped together, it's very fatiguing to follow. It was inevitable that with the explosion in Rails' popularity, some hastily slapped together books would appear. Here they come.

Ruby on Rails power is an unfinished product. I checked the errata list on the publishers site and it is missing many errata items found just in the first 3 chapters alone. At the end of chapter 3, I am no longer willing to continue using this book because:

-Many obvious errata items. This book seems like a rough draft. I usually send authors the errata I find. In this case, errata in the book as well as the source code available on the publishers site is just too numerous.

I am sorry to say that I would not reccomend this book in its present form. However, I believe this could be a a very good book with the neccessary revisions made.

I received this book earlier today and am already getting frustrated.

When I first opened the book the spine cracked. I didn't yank it open or try to break the spine, I literaly opened to a page and heard the crack. When I checked the area around the crack, the page on the right hand side had already popped out. In otherwords, before I read a single word in the text, the binding was demonstrating that it is going to be an issue.

Moving past the poor binding to the content. I'm on a Mac and thankfully already have Ruby, Gems, Rails, etc loaded; thankfully because this text only deals with Windows. I honestly don't mind when a text such as this omits installation instructions, but it does irk me that there are pages detailing installation on one os and not the other two. Either cover installation - for all three big operating systems - or skip installation all together.

Since I do have everything happily installed, I moved on to the next section, everything was going smoothly as I progressed through the greeting application, but when I hit the RandomImageController (page 20), things went amiss and I was unable to get the code to work. Having experienced similiar problems with other programming language texts, my first instinct is to double, triple, and quadruple check my code against the book code => matched, my second instinct is to check the book's errata => there is none, my third instinct is to email the author or the book's forum => again none. This does not bode well.

Obviously I'm not impressed so far. If my impression changes, I'll post an update.