Growing Rails Applications in Practice

by Henning Koch, Thomas Eisenbarth

Genres: Programming, Technology, Software, Technical

88 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Mauricio Carvalho]

Short and practical.

It could be less "gem selling", and more plain ruby on rails style book.

The author tries to show his abstractions (gems) as a way to go but once the book has a few years things just changed. All concepts are still useful nowadays.

This is the kind of book that deserves a revision and update.

[Lucas Húngaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quick read, a bit superficial on some points (like testing) but filled with good practical advice to better organize your Rails application once it's no longer a simple "15 minutes blog".

[Jan Bussieck · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book on growing rails application I've come across that actually presents an integrated and overarching solution to the problem rather than a smorgasbord of architectural fads and ideas, a must read

[Kiril Kirilov · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is an 'OK book'. Okey-ish.

[Diógenes Fernandes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too short.

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing Rails Applications in Practice is only 88 pages long. But if you follow the advices given by Henning Koch and Thomas Eisenbarth your Rails application will be in a much better state. Most of the ideas are not new and when you know the Practical Object Oriented Design in Rubybook by Sandi Metz you may have already seen how small methods make the life simpler. That idea can be used for Rails as well.

Making controllers smaller, use inheritance and use models even if they don’t need ActiveRecord are simple things you can do right from the beginning. You don’t need to make a mess until you can make the situation better. But as also is explained in the book, don’t try everything you hear. Complex applications need a complex set of solutions. Not everything fits and therefore you need to be aware of the dependencies you add – by that in form of Gems or in the patterns you use. However, if you select a few ideas and implement them fully in your application you are far better off. Give it a try.

[Gurkan Oluc · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like a catalogue of ideas which has been born in last 2-3 years about Rails application development. It has really good patterns in it. But sometimes a little bit confusing due to the way it follows. When you finish chapter n you are saying, ok this is the best way to do this but when you go on, you see that there is a better way.

[Heidar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this to compare it to Trailblazer. Both are solving the same problem although Trailblazer takes code organization to a much more granular level using third party gems. This book provides simpler solutions, almost all of which require no extra gems.

The CSS part is interesting and feels similar to the way React components are organized.

[Dave Slutzkin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid book, every Rails dev should at least have an opinion on these techniques. If you don't currently have a well-understood set of practises for building your apps, you could do a lot worse than to just follow these wholesale.

[Matilda Smeds · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concise, readable book, that contains a lot of applicable, useful ideas for organizing and testing Rails codebase. I particularly liked the controller patterns, namespacing and how CSS BEM is presented. Surely when I re-read the book there I can still get more out of it.

[William Notowidagdo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent guide on how to stucture and code your Rails app into a maintainable project.

It is 5 stars for me if only the author would use a single Rails app throughout the book to show how their suggestions being implemented.

[Steven Harlow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Good suggestions on how to avoid complicated and hard to change code. Particularly liked Form Models, Service Objects, and the BEM technique of organizing your CSS stylesheets.

[Pablo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good book and so short that I would say this is required reading for all Ruby on Rails developers.

[Horacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Corto, con claros y buenos consejos que se pueden implementar de inmediato. Un poco limitado en scope.

[Leonid Batizhevsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book for junior rails developers. Experienced developers don't found anything new

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short, simple, and to the point. Not all of the use cases and reasoning are applicable to all codebases, but at the very least they pose interesting questions and propose useful ways of thinking.

[Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice set of advices - do follow OOP and Rails spirit. Only the CSS part is questionable.

[Artem Pyankov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book if you're new in Rails development. But shown techniques are de-facto standard for modern web-development.

[Dan Ofer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Rails programmer should read this book.

[Manoj M J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book that every Rails Dev should read. Very concise and to the point. Gives lot of code organisation tips which will really help to maintain a growing codebase. I'm glad I read this.

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a good start if you start to become overwhelmed by the amount of code/files your Rails app has.The techniques presented are pretty helpful and well explained with great code samples.

[Max Borysov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really nice book. It does not show deep/complex examples, but still very helpful. Recommended for reading.

[Dim Ether · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really thin (many books are still into the "why did we write this book" by page 70) and doesn't go deep but it's unbiased and a honest collection of tips. Actually, it felt like the missing part of the official Rails documentation, chapter "Midsize to big apps and technical debt". It could save some future pain to people who are still on their honeymoon with Rails.

[Tassos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute, good tips that make sense.