Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader’s time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there’s not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics. ...
Django is a framework I’ve long (in web years) held in some esteem, despite never having used it before the past few weeks. The framework’s creators’ many well reasoned contributions on all manner of debates about the web suggested a thoughtful approach, and the range of high quality sites powered by Django has kept growing, with the recent launch of EveryBlock being a prime example of its capabilities. So I was delighted to receive a copy of The Definitive Guide to django: Web Development Done Right for review. ...
The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects—a Ruby book that doesn’t even mention web frameworks—was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience. ...
According to wikipedia: In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Object-oriented design patterns typically show relationships and interactions between classes or objects, without specifying the final application classes or objects that are involved. Algorithms are not thought of as design patterns, since they solve computational problems rather than design problems. ...
For those who aren’t aware, ruby gems refers a way of packaging up code so it can be easily distributed for other developers to use, and a tool to help with the distributing and/or installing that code. Find out more at wikipedia. On first glancing at this book, I wondered how you could fill a full-length book on the topic of gems. While getting the tools installed on some systems requires care, and there’s space for a couple of chapters on packaging your own libraries as gems, both topics have been covered alongside other topics in numerous volumes. What I’d missed was that contents not only covers both of those topics, but also looks at 26 different gems and explains how you might use them in your projects. ...
If you’ve encountered Ruby primarily through Rails and know it chiefly as an elegant tool for writing web applications it’s easy to miss its longer history as a tool for systems administration. Before Rails made Ruby the language-du-jour sysadmins bore much of the responsibility for keeping it alive, with the result that it has a suite of libraries helpful for server monitoring and a range of other administrative tasks. Author André Ben Hamou is clear that his book is not an exhaustive guide to using Ruby for systems administration. Rather than try to cover every possible context he provides an introduction to the language and some of its key libraries intended to give a feel for how it might be used and why it leads to succinct and expressive solutions. A number of the more important libraries for working with network protocols and files are covered, and there’s a good introduction to rubygems and how they can be used and created. ...
Practical Rails Projects is a weighty tome, coming in just shy of 600 pages, which led to this review taking a little longer than it otherwise might: not just because the book took a while to get through, but also because it wasn’t quite so practical to lug it on the bus as some of the others I’ve recently covered. A result of that heft is a fairly comprehensive volume, but one that doesn’t feel quite so consistent as it perhaps should. ...
I am not in this book’s target audience. Whereas the book is aimed at experienced java developers who are just getting started with rails and want to take advantage of JRuby, I’ve rarely touched Java but have lots of ruby and rails experience and am interested in JRuby mainly to see where I might be able to take advantage of java libraries, or ship my ruby apps into new contexts. In that respect, the book was helpful but there’s probably space for a companion volume for people like me. ...
Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment. The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails’ testing framework are introduced as they’re used. The style isn’t test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance. ...
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? ...