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.

Ruby

Tonight I attended my second NovaRUG meeting. Dave Thomas of The Pragmatic Programmer discussed the Ruby object model and Paul Barry discussed Merb. There seems to still be a lot of development and refinement of the language and implementations at this point (including the best frameworks like Rails, Merb, and ORM). There is a good chance that Ruby will be a great language for rapidly creating high quality applications.

1. It has a very strong object model.
2. It has good support for unit testing.
3. Syntax is simple.
4. There is a decent developer community to support and champion it.
   

It will still take a high commitment to execute at the craftsman level, but with good methodologies I think some great code can be developed. I am currently researching the best book for an introduction to the language. Suggestions?