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Ruby on Rails 4.2 for Autodidacts
This book is a step by step guide to learn Ruby on Rails 4.2. It includes a basic tutorial for Ruby 2.2 and is written for programmers who know at least one other programming language and are familiar with HTML.
592 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2015
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August 22, 2018
This is an odd—but not bad!—Rails for beginners books.
It's sort of funny to reflect for a moment on how the attitudes of programming languages are reflected in other aspects of the programmers' output. Like, The C Programming Language is sloppy, The Little Schemer is kind of whimsical, and so on.
Rails books, not surprisingly, therefore, tend to be opinionated.
Sometimes this is a barrier to learning, as the guy who wants to learn "Hello, World" in Rails is given 17 things to tackle before getting to code that one little app. (That is not an exaggeration. I counted 15 different things in one beloved Rails book which—when you add Ruby and Rails, themselves—meant that the user had to bring into his awareness a total of 17 things before getting to "Hello, World".) I feel like Mr. Wintermeyer's book is something of a reaction to that, as he presents the user with:
1) Installation
2) Some rather light Ruby basics
3) Hello, world!
What a relief!
Anyway, this particular edition is available online. And because I've just inherited a mountain of Rails code, I thought I'd look it over. (And as is almost always the case, I learned stuff I did not know, even though it's a subject I've worked in for a while.)
So far, so good. The first seven chapters are the strongest, though the whole book (even these chapters) feels as though it hasn't been given a final edit—and as the book progresses, it feels less and less edited, and less and less thorough. The author doesn't over-explain, which is good, but in the later chapters, the explanations can be quite scarce, which means that it will be rougher for a novice.
It's also very opinionated but not necessarily in a bad way. The most thorough later chapters are on, of all things, internationalization, caching and deployment. Deployment just isn't something you can cover quickly, I don't think, and the author sort of admits as much right up front. (He's good about telling you what you can skip. In deployment, he's basically saying, "you're not gonna get this but it's goin' in the book anyway".)
Caching was kind of interesting. I knew nothing about it, because I've never had to. (Relatively low-volume Rails sites.) It seems inappropriate for a beginner's book. But maybe this and deployment is part of his "autodidact" idea. If you're a one-man-shop, you might need both of these sooner than . you think.
The internationalization stuff was remarkably thorough, and convinced me that a lot of Rails' cutesy English-isms make it not worth the effort for non-English speakers. (My prejudice, I grant.) But I suspect Herr Wintermeyer is German, and so he has way more experience than most in dealing with all the pitfalls of Ruby's pro-English opinionatedness.
Overall, I thought it was good, and that it could've been a 4 star book with another solid round of editing (including some technical editing) and a five star book with some of the later chapters fleshed out a bit more. But you could do a lot worse!
It's sort of funny to reflect for a moment on how the attitudes of programming languages are reflected in other aspects of the programmers' output. Like, The C Programming Language is sloppy, The Little Schemer is kind of whimsical, and so on.
Rails books, not surprisingly, therefore, tend to be opinionated.
Sometimes this is a barrier to learning, as the guy who wants to learn "Hello, World" in Rails is given 17 things to tackle before getting to code that one little app. (That is not an exaggeration. I counted 15 different things in one beloved Rails book which—when you add Ruby and Rails, themselves—meant that the user had to bring into his awareness a total of 17 things before getting to "Hello, World".) I feel like Mr. Wintermeyer's book is something of a reaction to that, as he presents the user with:
1) Installation
2) Some rather light Ruby basics
3) Hello, world!
What a relief!
Anyway, this particular edition is available online. And because I've just inherited a mountain of Rails code, I thought I'd look it over. (And as is almost always the case, I learned stuff I did not know, even though it's a subject I've worked in for a while.)
So far, so good. The first seven chapters are the strongest, though the whole book (even these chapters) feels as though it hasn't been given a final edit—and as the book progresses, it feels less and less edited, and less and less thorough. The author doesn't over-explain, which is good, but in the later chapters, the explanations can be quite scarce, which means that it will be rougher for a novice.
It's also very opinionated but not necessarily in a bad way. The most thorough later chapters are on, of all things, internationalization, caching and deployment. Deployment just isn't something you can cover quickly, I don't think, and the author sort of admits as much right up front. (He's good about telling you what you can skip. In deployment, he's basically saying, "you're not gonna get this but it's goin' in the book anyway".)
Caching was kind of interesting. I knew nothing about it, because I've never had to. (Relatively low-volume Rails sites.) It seems inappropriate for a beginner's book. But maybe this and deployment is part of his "autodidact" idea. If you're a one-man-shop, you might need both of these sooner than . you think.
The internationalization stuff was remarkably thorough, and convinced me that a lot of Rails' cutesy English-isms make it not worth the effort for non-English speakers. (My prejudice, I grant.) But I suspect Herr Wintermeyer is German, and so he has way more experience than most in dealing with all the pitfalls of Ruby's pro-English opinionatedness.
Overall, I thought it was good, and that it could've been a 4 star book with another solid round of editing (including some technical editing) and a five star book with some of the later chapters fleshed out a bit more. But you could do a lot worse!
Displaying 1 of 1 review