Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Pro)

published	September 10th 2007 by Apress
binding	Paperback
isbn	1590598474 (isbn13: 9781590598474)
pages	300
description	Pro ActiveRecord helps you take advantage of the full power of your database engine from within your Ruby programs and Rails applications. A...more [close] Pro ActiveRecord helps you take advantage of the full power of your database engine from within your Ruby programs and Rails applications. ActiveRecord, part of the magic that makes the Rails framework so powerful and easy to use, is the model element of Rail's model/view/controller framework. It's an object-relational mapping library enabling you to interact with databases from both Ruby and Rails applications. Because ActiveRecord is configured with default assumptions that mesh perfectly with the Rails framework, Rails developers often find they hardly need think about it at all. However, if you are developing in Ruby without Rails, or are deploying against legacy databases designed without Rails in mind, or you just want to take advantage of database-specific features such as large objects and stored procedures, you need the in-depth knowledge of ActiveRecord found in this book. In Pro ActiveRecord, authors Kevin Marshall, Chad Pytel, and Jon Yurek walk you through every step from the basics of getting and installing the ActiveRecord library to working with legacy schema to using features specific to each of today's most popular database engines, including Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL, and more! You’ll come to a deep understanding of ActiveRecord that will enable you to truly exploit all that Ruby, Rails, and your chosen database platform have to offer. [close]
date added	06-23-07 edit book

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James rated it:

10/17/07

bookshelves: techbooks

Read in October, 2007

Right at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there’s not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other ‘advanced’ uses. That’s fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord�...more Right at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there’s not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other ‘advanced’ uses. That’s fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord’s most basic concepts?

Judging from postings on the rails email list, there’s certainly a lot of confusion about ActiveRecord, associations, observers, how to work with legacy table names and primary keys, and so on. But in a book with a title prefix of “Pro” I was expecting to jump straight into the nitty gritty of topics like compound/composite primary keys and performance tuning, probably with some real world examples, and maybe with a serious exploration of AR’s internals. As it is, such topics only get a quick treatment in the final chapter (the compound/composite primary keys section is a paragraph referring users to http://compositekeys.rubyforge....

It’s almost always instructive reading other developers’ code and it would be unfair to claim that I didn’t spot a couple of tips that may prove useful, but they were passing things. And sometimes I found myself wondering what happened to the tech review process, particularly in the coverage of the has_one association, where not only is the variable naming confusing, but they seem to be calling the each method on a single ActiveRecord instance.

I’m left wondering what the audience is for this book. The title and blurbs suggest it’s pitched at people who want to go deeper into ActiveRecord than they have before, but the content is better suited for someone with some database experience who wants to pick up ActiveRecord to write some scripts. As it is, if you’ve worked with ActiveRecord before your time will be better spent writing plugins and exploring the internals for yourself, and if you’ve not you’ll get most of the same material from a decent Rails book and some time exploring.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at apress, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places....less

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