RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)

I'm not an experienced coder by any means but I do have some very basic fundamental understanding of both Web programming (HTML, PHP, PERL, CSS) and working within Terminal (on my MacOSX). I am on page 45 of this book and I have needed to reference more websites and other documentation to get through the examples then is reasonably acceptable. The book is definitely out of date compared to the current Rails edition and you can read this fact as even written by the author on this very Amazon page. What he doesn't tell you or rather leads you to believe is that you will be able to get past the subtle or relatively easy conflicts of what the book says and of what you actually need to program the RailsSpace application simply. This is just not true. The user group website is very difficult to navigate through and similarly confusing. It is mostly written by users of questionable credentials. Just a few examples of fundamental problems I am having: 1) Installing Ruby and Rails is not really explained. The author breezes through where to download the files and the few command prompts that are needed to make it work but fails to adequately cover where these installations are in your directory and how to change those paths. 2) Just going with what ever is defaulted will mess you up when you have to install MySQL. I can't get my RailsSpace application to talk to MySQL at this point. 3) I have then found out that Rails 2 doesn't use MySQL for default but SQLite so on a totally different site I found that I had to make the railsspace application differently, negating the work that was done already. 4) I then had to install MySQL manually and have no help for the errors I get when trying to run the application. I have wasted so much time and attempted so many things trying to get the components to work together that I am certain I have screwed up my system by trying every suggestion I see on the internet. I don't know how to just scrap it all and start from scratch now knowing what irrelevant information is in the book now and substitute it with the right stuff. On the authors blog site he tells you that they have both abandoned working on the RailsSpace application to pursue other things and leave you in the hands of a Google user group. This is unprofessional and the publisher of the book should pull this dated, now complicated and obviously unsupported version of the book. They should rewrite it according to the current Ruby and Rails version if they want to continue selling it. I am so upset that I have invested the time I did into this book and that I spent the money on it too. I really liked the idea but all that you will do if you buy this book is make more work for yourself. The changes to the Rails program and syntax is not the authors fault but why are they too good to write an update and release it so that it is compatible? Look at all the 4-5 star reviews and note the dates they were written- as I said I'm sure when the book was current it was great but now it is no longer a "step-by-step guide" but a rough outline.

I must agree with other reviewers that this book is out-of-date. The author makes common use of things that are now deprecated in the newer versions of the software.I have had the same problems as others with getting the project to work with MySQL. It was a real nightmare, requiring many hours on Google and having to edit the registry (yuck!) due to numerous installs/uninstalls of MySQL before I finally got things working. I am getting ready to start Chapter 4 - Registering Users. I am seriously hoping that I've gotten past all the hurdles and can start making better progress. I also agree with the reviewer who stated that he realized he'd gotten into a monkey typing mode - typing in a lot of stuff without understanding why. I think the author could have made a bit more effort to explain things in more detail, like what the bazillion files are (and what they do) that get automatically created when you first create the project.What I do like about this book is that you learn incrementally by building a real-world application from the ground up. I don't understand why more computer programming books don't do that. I hate programming books that have a chapter on handling strings, a chapter on arrays, etc., with a few code snippets and no explanation of how it all fits together.BTW, I am an experienced programmer (20+ years), but this is my first venture into Ruby. This the only Ruby on Rails book I've worked with, so I can't compare this book with other similar books currently on the market.

I found this book frustrating. About 70 pages into the the tutorial I realized I was monkey-typing and had no real idea what was going on -- things were happening, but I didn't understand *why*. I abandoned the book for another in the same series ( The Rails Way (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) . That book is easily twice as long and does nothing but introduce Rails, and although it was a hard slog to read I found it a much, much better introduction to the technology -- and possibly more importantly for Rails, the conceptual framework needed to use it.At the end of the day, you want to walk away from an introductory book with a real understanding of the topic. I believe this book's dual focus (social networking + Rails intro) distracted the authors from clearly introducing Rails. This may be a useful introduction for a novice software developer, but if you want to really understand what Rails is doing and prepare yourself for doing real development, I cannot recommend it.

I have gone through this book several times and am still using it actively to learn Ruby on Rails. In my judgment, if you buy this book in conjunction with David Black's book "Ruby for Rails:..", you should be all set. Granted both books are a bit old considering that Rails 2.0.x is out, still nothing comes close in terms of the sheer usefulness from a learning point of view to these two books. I own several other Ruby and Ruby on Rails texts, but these are the two texts that I find myself frequently turning to. Initially, towards the beginning, it was David Black text, now increasingly so, it is this text.Both Michael and Aurelius are very bright and gifted educators and pretty good developers at the same time.I would look forward to buy another text by these two authors which takes off where this text leaves us and has been updated for Rails 2.0.x. Go for it gentlemen, I am cheering for you.

Great book for anyone getting started. Concise and extremly practical.... Combined with the free screencast, simply rich authenticator... And the methods named_routes, generate, and recognise_path from ActionController::Routing::Routes... plus google... I had an e-commerce site up and running in days.

Das Buch erlaubt einen sehr schnellen Einstieg in die Webprogrammierung und Rails.Außerdem kann man damit Schritte für Schritt eine Social Networking Anwendung erstellen.Dieses Follow step-by-step hat auch seinen Preis. Leider wird auf die Hintergründe des verwendeten Codes nur sehr knapp eingegangenund man muß ständig im Internet hinterher recherchieren. Begleitliteratur zu Ruby und Rails ist faktisch unabdingbar.Außderdem enthält das Buch viele Bugs. Hierfür gibt es zwar auch im Internet die Korrekturen, aber man muß ständig nachschlagen.Viel schwerer wiegt allerdings die Tatsache, daß das Buch auf veralteten SW Versionen für Rails, Ruby und Gems beruht.Daher sind die Code-Beispiele teilweise nicht mehr lauffähig. Auch hier kann man wieder updates für Rails 2 im Internet finden,jedoch artet das ganze in eine ziemlich wilde Internetrecherche aus. Das Buch würde eigentlich eine neue Auflage benötigen, aber derAutor ist längst beim nächsten Projekt (Insoshi).Dennoch: ich bin damit innerhalb weniger Wochen von 0 auf eine 'halbe' Web-Anwendung gestartet. Mit einem Rails for Beginners wäreich heute noch fast bei Null. Der superschnelle Einstieg hat eben seinen Preis. 10,- für das gebrauchte Buch sind eigentlich einmüdes Nichts dafür....Trotz der Kritik kenne ich nichts vergleichbares. Grundsätzlich eine Supersache!!