| Advanced Rails Recipes | 
| Author: Mike Clark
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Category: Book
List Price: $38.95
Buy New: $18.98
You Save: $19.97 (51%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (6 reviews)
Sales Rank: 78791
Format: Illustrated
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 7.5 x 1
ISBN: 0978739221
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.117
EAN: 9780978739225
ASIN: 0978739221
Publication Date: May 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-6 of 6 | | « PREV | | |
 Great content, that leaves you wanting more May 19, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've been reading through this book since my copy arrived a week or so ago, and have already "baked" five of the recipes into my Rails applications. I expect that there will be many more solutions found as I progress through the book.
The recipes in the book are clear and concise, and have been easy to implement in my own applications. A broad range of topics are covered, so there will certainly be something for everyone. I've also found that while the recipes are directly applicable, a number of them also teach "patterns" that you can use in a variety of contexts, not just to achieve exactly what's described in the recipe.
Many recipes are related thematically, or build upon each other, making for great teaching. For example, there are four recipes covering how to search for text in fields stored in the database, from extremely simple (a nice way to implement LIKE searches across a couple fields) to three progressively more robust solutions using external full-text search engines (Ferret, Sphinx, and Solr). This sequence really illustrated the trade-offs you can make, in terms of complexity vs. flexibility and power, when implementing search, and was instrumental in my selection of the Sphinx engine and the Ultrasphinx plug-in for doing searches in my projects. Without the clear sequence of recipes, which illustrated implementations of similar searches, I would have had to spend hours on the Internet, searching tutorials and blog posts for details, and the results wouldn't have been as directly comparable. The time savings here alone justifies the cost of the book.
If I was going to write about a limitation of the book, it would have to be the length. At ~450 pages, it's not a slim volume. But with the range of material covered (reflecting the growing complexity of the Rails ecosystem), it's hard to cover any specific topic area in depth. Even with the nicely-covered search topic, I could envision even more recipes. (Advanced search and savable searches come to mind.)
But wanting more is just quibbling. It's not a reason to not buy this book, it's a reason to start asking for Volume 2!
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