This was my go-to reference for months, as I was learning Ruby on Rails.

It's probably not as useful now for Rails 3. Hopefully they'll come out with a new edition soon.

The best book about rails I ever read :)

one of the books that teach about relevant things that will make me rich.

Rails is awesome. It empowers you. Being an entrepreneur has never been easier.

Very good introduction to Rails. I found the last chapters less useful than the first ones.

Note: This is an older version of the book and uses an older version of Rails.

probably would want the ruby programming book by the same author to go along with it.

Buzzwords don't make a great book.

"AWDR4" is a ... mess. The book doesn't have a clear goal of what to teach you. The "Rails is Agile" yada-yada, recital of the Agile manifesto and etc is just a facade. Rails is not an universal fix it all hammer that scales (architecture wise) in any project and size.

I might actually say that Rails as it is now in 2015, is in much trouble and definitely has to push focus on architectural changes and improvements instead of useless features *cough* *cough* ActionCable *cough*. https://github.com/apotonick/trailblazer is an attempt to correct mistakes but is it enough? Time will tell after Rails 5.

Back to the book, the pieces that make no sense to me are - The Ruby introduction, Non-browser Applications and Finding Your Way Around Rails.

The Ruby introduction is too shallow to do anyone good. I'm actually concerned that people might think they know Ruby now.

Non-browser Applications - no idea what the chapter was supposed to show.

Finding your Way Around Rails - after going through 2/3 of the book, now you learn where stuff is supposed to go in Rails. Suuuuper late and much useless by now. Everyone should've googled


The good things - exercises and story-driven chapters.




.
What to read if you want a good Rails intro book? https://www.railstutorial.org is more relevant, show-cases better Rails usage and better exercises.

Ruby on Rails intro for complete beginners. Online rails guides are great companion. Would suggest reading rails code for better understanding of rails internals. Sstart with the ActiveSupport's code.

Steps through the creation of a simple but useful application - very much a workbook for Rails.

A good book to have read at some point for historical reasons - DHH's involvement kind of makes that an imperative. However, it's dated (actually pre 1.0) so many of the specifics are no longer correct or recommended, and it misses big chunks of what is now conventional rails (RESTful routes for example). A better source for current practice (at least until 3.0) is The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez

第3版は、2.3向けだったので待望の第4版。
英語版では、3.0向けの内容だったが日本語訳のスケジュール的に
3.1がすでにリリース後だったため、日本語訳で3.1に対応させる
という辺りがすばらしい。

内容はいつもの通り

1. 開発環境の準備
2. デモアプリの開発
3. rails詳説

といった感じ。1ではrvm使っているし実践的。
2ではテストがrspecだったらもっと良かったのになぁと思う。
ただ、一連の開発フローがちゃんとアジャイル開発になっていて
初心者がアジャイル開発体験するにはもってこい。

3はRails3レシピブックを補完するような内容。
読んでおいて損はない。

全体的に、このシリーズの安定感はすごい。
次の版が出たとしても、前の版を読んでいるなら
日本語訳版が出る前に、英語版が出て直ぐに買って読むのが
英語の勉強にもなるし良いと思われる。

Suggested by my friend Kory. I read the beta version of this book. Again, in some ways I prefer books with a few errors, keeps me on my toes. I've got a few ideas on what I'm going to build with this new tool, I'll post back here when I do (although now I kind of want to play with jquery since I really know nothing about that library and it could prove useful in rails, or well any type of web apps). It's quite verbose, but I guess for people who want their hand held a bit (I'll admit, hand-holding is sometimes appreciated) that's okay. It's a good book, but it's lacks a literary tact that made why's guide so much fun. It's 100% technical with a few rough attempts at humor. I guess you could say, it's the same as most of the rubbish literature in our profession, good for learning how to do something (sadly unimaginative as it's still in the realm of business apps) but not much else. I can only recommend this book if you want to get acquainted with rails. I guess I'm going to have to keep looking for my fix of good technical and literature content, Why's gone and Joel Spolsky's work only goes so far. I guess I just need something new and different of the same quality to inspire me (after reading this book, I need it).