Off the rails...

April 9, 2008 5:09 PM

Any good Rails 2.0 books for beginners?

The books I have access to are for Rails 1.2. I'm running into brick wall after brick wall getting the opening chapter examples in these books to work with Rails 2.0.2, missing plug-ins, missing template files, scaffolding doesn't work, etc.

Instead of installing the Rails 1.2 gem, I'd like to bite the bullet and learn Rails 2.0. Unfortunately, the Rails Way book apparently is for established Rails coders, of which I am not one.

I'd call myself reasonably familiar with Java, PHP, etc. and don't need to learn programming, I just need to get up to speed quickly on how Rails does its magic without poring through oblique Google search results on how to cobble a 2.0 app together from a 1.2 app.

Are there other Rails 2.0 books or online documentation out now, which have working code examples of a small web application, from start to finish?

posted by Blazecock Pileon to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Well, 37Signals, the developers of Ruby on Rails, has a few books that they recommend. I'd check them out here.
posted by Aanidaani at 5:16 PM on April 9

It is unclear to me if those books are Rails 1.2 or 2.0, from what's available in their respective descriptions.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:23 PM on April 9

Do you have The Rails Way? I don't think it's for established coders. There's quite a bit of intro material in there, too. I don't know of any other 2.0 books yet.
posted by cdmwebs at 5:26 PM on April 9

Yeah, The Rails Way is the one well-recommended 2.0 book I've heard of so far. I went through the same pain recently, discovering the Pickaxe Book is less than useless now that things have moved to 2.0, which has made Django books my recommendation.
posted by yerfatma at 5:56 PM on April 9

Do you have The Rails Way? I don't think it's for established coders.

I do now, figuring that I'll need it at some point. But most of the "poor" Amazon reviews seem to make that complaint.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:49 PM on April 9

FYI, the "Pickaxe Book" (Programming Ruby) is a Ruby book - not a Rails book.
posted by cdmwebs at 8:28 PM on April 11