Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

I love this book, I also loves that he includes the source code of it with an MIT/Beerware license.

Great book overall. Explains RoR concepts very well, but the content formatting is a bit confusing, at least in the Kindle edition I bought.The code listings are printed in a proportional font rather than monospace; I often have to troubleshoot/fix unnecessary errors due to typos. It's also difficult to distinguish actual code-change listings from purely informational code-snippets; I often have to re-read several pages to see what I have to actually code.

There is not a lot of tutorials for Ruby on Rails unless you spend money for them. I have the 6th version as well. Both are worthy learning material. There is a but to this. The binding on the book itself is coming apart. A lot of pages are half way loose. I contacted Learn Enough. They were no help at all. They blamed it on the seller. Although I don't think the seller had the book printed. I am pretty sure if I get another it will have the same problem. I asked for a PDF version and showed proof of ownership. No Help. I say buy at your own risk.The Django 4 by Example guys will give a PDF version if you show proof of purchase.

Seemed like it was going to be a good book, but sadly even the very first Hello World app didn't work. I followed all the steps and used the Cloud IDE just like it said, but didn't work. I tried multiple times, starting over from the very beginning each time and still unsuccessful. The book assumes you already have a lot of Unix/Linux experience and are well versed with the command line. So keep that in mind. No help in getting things setup in a local environment, everything is geared towards using a Cloud 9 IDE (running on AWS). This requires you to get an AWS account. The free-tier AWS instances kept timing out due to high CPU usage even just installing Ruby (step 1). I tried using a for-fee tier to see if that would work better, it did install everything but still couldn't get the Hello World app running. Definitely not happy and I will be returning the book.

This is a good introduction to Ruby on Rails. It walks you through the creation of a few very simple projects then focuses on a pretty sophisticated application with user creation/management/editing and posting/following activity. You learn how to do this in a development environment on your own machine as well as how to deploy to production using Heroku (which might be an impediment to some now that Heroku has discontinued their free tier, but the deployment to production is not a major part of the project and you may just use the development version to experience and play with all the functionality). Along the way you are introduced to concepts and tools like Model-View-Controller (MVC), GitHub, Test Driven Development, and Ruby. It helps to have some knowledge of programming but I think a very motivated beginner could get quite a bit out of this book. The code is very well proofread in my experience (but watch out for the YAML formatting) and there are online GitHub repositories that you can consult with all the code from the book in them. My only complaint is that the author will occasionally introduce something, like JavaScript, and use it in the application being built, but then he will say, don’t worry, you don’t need to understand this in depth. Consequently, you will have elements in your application that you don’t really understand very well or even at all, which I guess is fine in this learning environment but if something goes wrong it could be very frustrating to figure out how to fix it. Apart from that this is an excellent and seemingly very popular (it’s in its 7th edition and has been around for many years) introduction to Ruby on Rails.

Great book for beginners.