Good reference book for the beginning user. May confuse those that are learning on rails 2.x.

I got this book for a Ruby on Rails class. The class was using Rails 2.0 and this is one of the few Rails books out there that covers Rails 2.0. That was its main highlight. It feels like more of a reference manual than something to learn from. It does seem comprehensive, but it's only good for learning Rails if you already know Rails. It jumps headfirst into complicated topics without explaining why or what for or giving any background. But if you basically already know Rails and just need to look some things up, this book will occasionally be useful.

This seems to have comprehensive coverage of rails/ruby, but may lack the Rails 2.0 coverage I expected. It feels a bit like they threw in some 2.0 updates in order to be able to put "Covers RAILS 2.0" on the cover. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

Excellent overview of Rails. Best for someone a bit past the beginner level.

Requires a good understanding of the Ruby language, basic Rails concepts (available in more than a few web tutorials) and how the Web works. (Servers, clients, statelessness, client-host communication protocols.)

Brilliant layout. Teaches how to really do things the Rails Way.

The "Rails Way" is several orders of magnitude more productive than almost all other systems. It's true high-level programming at the conceptual level. Example: I need a database with several tables all inter-related on key fields. Using ActiveRecord it can be set up in minutes. This includes foreign key relationships, 1:Many:1 setups and all the forms to Create, Read, Update and Delete them (CRUD). In addition I can make changes to tables. Test the changes and roll them back if I please. Then roll forward in a different design.

Makes the "try, try, try again" process a snap. Try all the tables, forms and layouts you please. Then go with what works best.

All this without once writing my own SQL code, writing HTML forms code (Amen!) or guessing just where to put the business rules code.

It's MVC in the fast lane. (That's MVC on steroids.)

While the concepts and methods to productivity are tantalizing. The book could have used a bit more explicit project coding. Like a full and complete auctions web site or a blog.

Nonetheless, this book is a delightful journey. What a trip!

Critical ingredient: Making sure I understand the "Rails Way." Once it sinks in it is truly amazing. Do it the Rails Way and the helper methods make forms and screen handling a snap.

I just picked this up yesterday, and from what I've read already it's a really great general reference for the Rails framework. So far it's been good for understanding nested routes, some of the intricacies of REST, etc.

Short and sweet; I've read this book cover to cover three full times. I use it as reference in between reads. You need this book. Now. Go.

I was very excited when I heard this book was coming out, but I now have the distinct feeling that this book was a waste of money.

* The book's layout is absolutely atrocious. There's too much space between each line and the fonts are all too big - this means too little content on each page and way more pages than there need to be. The book is too thick to be portable because of this.

* There are almost no diagrams or illustrations.

* Too much of the book just repeats what's available in the Rails API reference online. The reference material seems like fluff. For example, the description of RJS goes on for several pages describing the methods of the "page" object passed into RJS scripts. This could have been a two- or three-page table, if the lines were sanely spaced. The rest of the chapter could have given examples and a description. The AJAX chapter is little more than a list of helper methods.

More meat!

Ruby on Rails was a revolutionary way to write web apps, and has evolved a lot over its last two years. This book finally breaks free of the tutorials and instructions for building basic applications, and shows you the meat of how to make Rails work for you. A great reference, you will learn more about topics you already know. The depth of knowledge in the Rails Way helps me build better applications.

Ok, maybe this book it's too long and some of the topics might seem a simple cut-and-paste from the Rails API docs.
Anyway if you already know Rails (aka: you have already read Agile Web development with Rails), this is your gateway to a deeper comprehension of this revolutionary framework.

Like many people who might read this review, I tend to be an auto-didact.

As an example, I taught myself Oracle-SQL (SQL-Plus) a few years back and I was ultimately sent to a oracle-based SQL course by my employer to shore up my database skills.

The course was like a religious experience, with a series of 'eureka-moments' where the instructor would fill in holes in my self-taught knowledge, and I wound up gaining a much stronger understanding of what I had been doing w/ my employer's database.

This book is very much like that. If you know a little bit about rails, this book fills in NUMEROUS 'swiss-cheesy' holes in your understanding of the framework...to the point where you'll be having various 'eureka-moments' yourself.

It's clearly written, insightful and well worth the price.

I'm halfway through this book (it's HUGE) and I love it. A great contribution and homage to Hal Fulton's THE RUBY WAY. BTW, this pair of books plus the book RailsSpace, which details the building of an example simple application, make a great set. Thanks so much for spending so much time on this contribution, Obie Fernandez, et al.!

Outstanding. Far and away the best Rails reference book published to date.

Very readable and well organized. The book provides solid coverage of the Rails framework as a whole and does a great job explaining some essential topics that are slighted in other Rails books (notably routing, testing, Rails plug-ins, and the guts of Active Record).

This is a reference book and not a tutorial. The examples, while good, are snippets and do not include a complete working application. For an excellent tutorial on Rails development, I suggest RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series).

This book is remarkably thorough and in-depth. It includes very practical knowledge about almost all aspects of Rails development and deployment. While beginners should choose a different book for an introduction to Rails, developers of all levels could benefit from keeping this book close at hand as they work.

I think the classic "Agile Web Development with Rails" is a better book for learning about Rails. But while this book comes in second in that category (which ain't bad), I think as a reference it comes in first.
One thing I especially like about this book is that he explains *why* certain things are the way they are. Quite a few times I found myself thinking, "So *that's* why it's like that" or "So *that's* why they did it that way". Good stuff.

I knew this was gonna be good when, in the Introduction, Obie writes, 'I don't like online APIs - I want a real book I can keep next to my keyboard that's dog-eared, bookmarked with sticky tabs, highlighted, and scribbled on.' Well, I read it from cover to cover like a Sherlock Holmes novel, and there it sits next to my keyboard, dog-eared, bookmarked with sticky tabs, highlighted, and scribbled on!

Rails had a must-read, now it has two.

The Rails Way is an outstanding book. Obie has done an extraordinary work, giving perspective and context to each corner of the framework with a wonderful style where a programmer talks to another programmer from solid experience. After you read this book you'll have a much deeper understanding of Rails and Rails programming.

Things that I liked in the book:

1. Good coverage of developing Rails app in RESTful way.
2. Some of the how to's

Things that I did not like:

1. Filling pages with fluff that does not add any value. The book could have 50 less pages.
2. Some of the chapters have the same material as Agile Web Development with Rails. (Even the table is the same, come on don't just copy paste from the Pragmatic programmer's pdf book, at least take time to paraphrase)
3. Lack of logical flow in the book.
4. RSpec is not part of Rails and even DHH does not use it. Why is it part of The Rails Way?

This is an outstanding book. It's not a good introduction to Rails, which it isn't intended to be, but for someone who knows the basics of Rails this book is both an essential reference and a valuable tutorial on the deeper aspects of Rails. Despite the fact that it is, at its heart, a reference, there's so much insight in the descriptions that it's a great tutorial as well for the intermediate Rails developer.

Having received my copy only days ago I'm blazing through it because I can't put it down. This is going to be a valuable resource for me - I love the conversational style mixed with no-nonsense tips from Obie.

Obie takes you through the internals of Rails, pointing out the interesting bits you took for granted when you started out. He backs up his observations with real-world experience. I especially love Courtenay's quips.

I'm glad I have this book in my library.

I've been waiting for this book since the Sample chapter on activeRecord was released. I suspected this book would answer all the people decrying Rails lack of (java or PHP-like) docs. Well, it is breathtaking in its scope (really), it is the definitive working dev's reference to the APIs, development, testing and deployment best practices and most widely adopted/tested plugins and gems (with a few holes). I believe every dev should go thru the table of contents slowly and carefully (several times).

Obie F seems to have assembled a huge team of resources to collaborate on each chapter, and it shows in exhaustive coverage. The table of contents entry for the testing chapter is 2 1/2 pages long and rspec is separate from that. So when i hit a problem, i think i'll hit this book first, then google rails mailing lists, and the intarweb tubes.

Negatives (cause I'm looking for perfection):
- footnotes are clustered at each chapter's end. Good luck finding a superscript number in a 75-page chapter.

-typesetting needs work. It doesn't clearly convey a hierarchy of topics, subtopics, and sub-subtopics , there's just lot of serif, non-serif, bold, italics and sizes on pages that walk through APIs (ajax, ActiveSupport chapters). Better to use outline-style numbering (e.g. Pragmatics). p. 229: the code example mixes an opening single-quote and backticks. Bad, bad.

- a number of what could be considered core topics are not covered: search/indexing libraries (ferret, solr, sphinx), HAML/SASS, pinging and site stats libs like mint, god, AWStats, etc. Postgres (this is a biggie), they recommend deploying to Mysql and Redhat/Centos/Debian /gentoo without much detail. textmate/vim/emacs/eclipse. source control libs like darcs and git. Rspec *is* given 30 pages, this is big. (There's not room for detailed discussion, but they could have mentioned these things ina sentence somewhere. most of these topics are covered in detail somewhere in blogspace, except for ferret/solr/sphinx deployment strategies, where you have to read mailing list archives.

- rails is on cusp of widespread adoption of release 2. I haven't seen anywhere that AW or Safari online books plans to issue regular PDF or online updates to the book. This is the main criticism if it is correct, relative to how Pragmatic has been releasing its books.

This is a hefty tome. I have just begun to crack it. My colleagues and I, all professional Rails developers, readily agreed that the detail in this book is remarkable. I opened to a random page and found brief discussions of every option to one of Rails's methods.

Note that this book doesn't start at zero, it is definitely a reference work. And that is a most welcome development for the Rails community.

I think this effort deserves to be the new standard Rails book.

Full disclosure: Obie has done some side work for my employer and I am acquainted with him. I do think I'd be saying the same thing if I'd never heard of the author.