Ruby on Rails is a pretty young technology. Its first release was midway 2004, and it has been gathering momentum since late 2004. It has yet to see its official 1.0 release. So it is a pleasant surprise that there already is a...
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Ruby on Rails is a pretty young technology. Its first release was midway 2004, and it has been gathering momentum since late 2004. It has yet to see its official 1.0 release. So it is a pleasant surprise that there already is a book available (electronically since June 2005), and that it such a good book! Why read this book? Since Dave Thomas' credentials as a technical writer are well established (pick up The Pragmatic Programmer if you haven't got it already), this question boils down to: why learn more about Ruby on Rails? For me, the answer was that I have long been looking for a simpler way to build web-applications. I'm a J2EE developer, and it seemed that every project I joined had a different set of frameworks. All of those frameworks could be configured to work together, and there are even frameworks whose only purpose is to make other frameworks work together. There are tools that generate stubs to wrap frameworks, and frameworks that wrap other frameworks, so that the developer needs not know what the underlying framework is. Madness. Rails behaves as if it were one framework. Configuration is simple (no xml) if you need it at all, since the defaults are pretty smart. Writing tests for your model and your controllers is actually easy. The API documentation is very good. Instead of mucking around with frameworks, you find yourself thinking: What do you want to do today? Drawbacks: Is Ruby on Rails slow? Performance is acceptable, I think, especially considering that web applications are database-bound. Rails also scales well - and anyway, processors are cheap, brains are not. Is Rails proven technology? Clearly it's not, it's the new kid on the block. More seriously, Rails is still in flux - the core api is still changing, and it could still take some time to settle down. So now is not the time to start huge Rails projects, now is the time to learn rails and build prototypes and small projects. And with that, this book will be a tremendous help. Comment | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)
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