Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development With Rails

I bought this as my first book to introduce me to rails and was very impressed. You learn by doing, as the entire book has you pretty much building a twitteresque website while learning how everything works as you go. Great way to start off on one of my favorite programming languages.Pros: Easy to follow, learn by creating, tons of resources. Michael Hartl (the author) has his own rails website to address this book specifically and has code on github and other places that makes this book especially helpful.Cons: The only con I found was that some of the recommended software was outdated but this is common as books do not keep up with tech. Hartl makes it easy to remedy this as well by listing multiple sources, including his own, that you can utilize.Bottom Line: If you've ever wanted to create a website, design a program or just automate something, then Rails is the language for you, and this is the perfect start.

My co-workers at work recommended other books as a starting point for learning rails but based on the user feedback, I decided to try this book first. I have done prior web development with other technology stacks (mainly using Java based frameworks), so although I was a complete novice to Rails, I was not a novice with web technologies (CSS, HTML, Javascript). I also studied Ruby using two books (Eloquent Ruby and The Well Grounded Rubyist) before attempting this book - although the author says that prior Ruby knowledge is not required (and he is right), it helped me to not think about Ruby code as much as it made sense the moment I saw it (i.e., it looked very familiar) and it certainly helped the situation given the amount of information that had to be assimilated in this book.This is an extremely well written tutorial for novices in Rails, and Ruby. I very much liked the author's style of test driven development where he writes tests first before writing any code for accomplish the task at hand. The code samples are nicely rendered and I have typed everyone of them out and tested them - they worked flawlessly. The author says his aim is to teach web development with rails and he definitely succeeded in accomplishing that. I found the first half of the book reasonably easy to follow and with latter half things get progressively difficult. Towards the last chapter or two, it wasn't very clear as to why we are doing what we are doing. I can certainly sympathize with "been reduced to a transcriptionist monkey" comment from another reviewer and I also felt more or less the same. However, I don't think this is the author's fault. A lot of ground is covered in the last couple of chapters and since the chapters continually build on one another, it seemed as though one has to assimilate prior chapters properly to follow the current one. Although I am done with one reading of the book, I have come to the conclusion that it won't suffice. I would have to build couple of apps on my own using the techniques and concepts illustrated in the book (along with some of the more advanced exercises) in order to properly digest the material.The author says that this book will give enough foundation to persue other advanced books and that certainly seems so. I'll be checking out at least one or two other rails books to strengthen my foundations.Well deserved kudos to the author. Two thumbs up! Highly recommended.

I decided to start learning Ruby on Rails after working with Microsoft's .NET technology. My skill level is approximately a mid-level programmer, and someone who is not familiar with Ruby.I chose Hartl's book to get me started with Rails based on the accolades from the other reviews (here and on StackOverflow) -- and I really must say, they are spot on. This book is extremely well written and proofed. The book "flows" very well -- from basic introductory chapters using simple applications, to more advanced, full featured applications. Hartl introduces Heroku for deploying your application -- and I recommend you follow his advice.Hartl's writing style is refined and refreshing when compared to other programming books.I started this book using Windows, however my recommendation to all readers is to not use Windows for this book. You are more than welcome to try, and you honestly won't have many issues at all, but the test driven strategies discussed in Chapter 3 ("Advanced Setup") are hard, if not impossible, to set up on Windows. You will have far less headaches on Linux or MacOS.(If you are on the fence about purchasing this book because you are an avid Windows user, I suggest you buy the book anyway. It's really that good and the issue in Chapter 3 can be skipped, though I found it so helpful it was worth a switch.)I highly recommend this book to all programmers looking to get into Rails. If you have never written CSS or HTML before, you may be a little over your head -- but honestly, I think I would still recommend it anyway. Try it to see if you can understand it, then find a CSS/HTML primer to fill in the spots afterwards. This is a rare book that is so well written, it's worth basing your learning around it.If you are an advanced programmer, you'll find this book a little easy, but that's OK as well. Breeze through the first half of the book, and then get into the more advanced chapters.All in all, a fantastic book. I only wish Hartl wrote a series of other books on Rails topics so I could buy them too -- maybe in the future :)

I'm rarely compelled to review products, but this book has forced my hand. Strictly speaking I've been using the web version for the past few days, but only five chapters in I've had to go ahead and order the print copy because it's so devastatingly awesome.I honestly consider this the finest technical instruction that I've ever encountered. As a long-time developer taking his first few tentative steps with both Ruby and Rails, this book is perfectly pitched. Moreover, the author's style is terrifyingly encouraging--it seems as though he's actually read a whole bunch of other flawed tech resources and avoided their pitfalls. Miraculous stuff!Do yourself a favor--if you're new to Rails, and especially if you're new to both Ruby and Rails--buy this book. Now! Go!

Although this book is available for free on the internet I found it very useful having it available offline on my kindle, it gave me a chance to read through the book before trying out the tutorials.

Love it

The book is perfect introduction to Ruby/Rails landscape. There are some parts that I think were written just to squeeze them in.Last two chapters cover a very important topic of many-to-many mapping and it feels like this could have been moved a bit toward the middle of the book, simply because of how important this is. The videos I purchased to go with the book sometimes had different content and coverage.The best way to describe this book is in it's title: tutorial.Unfortunately, you will not learn a lot about HTML and CSS as the author chose to take a shortcut and use Twitter bootstrap for simplicity.Likewise, this is an introduction to rails. If you want to actually use rails professionally, you need to know way more than in this book.

Over all the book is great, but some of the rails code won't work if you are trying to learn it with rails 4.0, so if this is what you are trying to learn you should check this out the new edition [...]but if you wanna learn rails 3.2 this book will be just fine.