Customer Reviews
Great Book - By: Saksham Gautam, 16 Apr 2010 
A must-have for learning Rails. By the end of the first section, you have a working version of the Rails application that's easy to follow & has lots of best practices. I understand that building apps with Rails is easy, but this book makes that process even easier. On the downside though, the second-half of the book has a lot of heavy stuff, too much theory. Although it is presented gently, I think more examples would be definitely a plus.
Allin all, it's a great book! Looking forward to the next version of the Rails & the book.
A good read for all developers - By: M. Hodgins, 06 Dec 2009 
Not only is this a great introduction to the marvelous Rails framework, it is also an easy read. Technical authors can learn a lot from this book on how to write quality 'how to' books. I'll also say that even if you don't intend to use Ruby & Rails for your web developement, this book is still useful; I use PHP but I've taken a lot of the ideas from this book & applied them my work.
great resource for experienced oo programmers - By: bookworm, 25 Aug 2009 This is a well written book & should get you off to a good start using rails if you are an experienced OO programmer & have a working knowledge of ruby.
The standard for Rails - By: S. Tual, 29 Mar 2009 By far the best Rails book money can buy, & I've browsed most of them if not all.
First, if you still had doubts, YES you need a book to really get a good, rapid grip on rails. It's moving at lightning speed,in fact a new release showed up a few days after this 3rd edition went to print. A recent rails book is worth a million outdated screencasts & hacked together tutorials.
The review process is worth mentionning. Each edition of this book go through a long beta process where it is reviewed by 'beta readers' - this edition went through 10 iterations for example. This means you'll find far less typos thanin other books, & a lot more 'best practices'.
I've taught a lot & I find this book to be of far higher standards than a lot of 'official' material out there developed for closed-source products.
One thing though, this book definitely assumes you've got some programming experience, preferably OO background, so I wouldn't consider it to be a 'beginner book' (to be fair it's not advertised as such). Rails itself is similar to this book - you need to have developed a lot of prior applications to truly appreciate its elegance.
I also recommend you have a look at their website, Pragmatic Programmer, where you can get an electronic copy of the bookin PDF & kindle format, well worth it.
