Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Agile Web Development with Rails



As a follow-up to the question posed at the end of this post, I've been working my way through the PDF version of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, et. al. and I think it is the best introduction to Rails out there. The book is currently in beta and is not available as a paper book yet.

The contents cover
  • Getting Started (Installation)
  • Building an Application
  • The Rails Framework (Active Record, Action Controller, Action View, etc.)
  • Security
  • Deployment

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I like the style of the book, because it is designed to be hands on with code included such that you can run it as you read and come out of this with a running application. Iterative development, testing, YAGNI, DRY and other agile development practices are naturally used. My only recommendation would be for the authors to use jQuery as the recommended javascript framework, but since it doesn't come as the default with Rails, then I can understand why they haven't.

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