Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 Review

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Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 ReviewI started reading this book back in its beta form, continuing with it until its current release. Flexible Rails evolved into a great book.
I came across Flexible Rails when I was evaluating using Flex for my company's flagship application GUI. Rails was already the back-end of choice, but I wasn't quite sure about the complexity of integrating that with a Flex client. This book helped show me that Flex and Rails could be developed together effectively.
Some of the highlights of Flexible Rails for me are:
- The book provides a non-trivial example application to build upon throughout the book.
- The book highlights real software development life-cycle steps to pull together the examples.
- The book puts all of the examples in context.
- The book covers REST.
- The book covers using RubyAMF.
- The book covers using the Cairngorm micro-architecture.
- The book covers the basics of turning the example application into an Adobe AIR application.
- The book has useful explanations of using FlexBuilder, Subversion, and other software development tools.
Overall, the book has an entertaining and very readable style. Flexible Rails created a standard to which I hold other technical books. You definitely get your money's worth.Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 Overview

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Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects: A step-by-step tutorial to building web mashups Review

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Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects: A step-by-step tutorial to building web mashups ReviewProviding a whistlestop tour through building a range of Ruby on Rails applications on the back of other services, Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects is aimed at those who are already comfortable building rails applications and want some sense of how they can be enhanced using a variety of other visualisation, data and processing providers.
Aside: The term `mashup' is one of those tech terms that's almost impossible to pin down. I should note that the way it used in this book (seemingly any application that draws on a third-party services) is not a way I'd choose to use it, but I'd rather focus on the book itself than on titling semantics.
The book hits all the usual suspects--google maps, flickr, technorati, wikipedia--and also covers the basics of building a facebook application, using paypal for payment processing, and sending faxes and SMS messages through a third party gateway. For those who want a quick overview of all of those options it'll give you enough to get started, though as a result of the pace only the very basics of each service is covered and anyone wanting to build a sophisticated app will have quite a bit of work in front of them learning the nuances of their chosen service providers.
Along with providing little detail of each service, the book suffers from not really digging into a number of topics that would make it a much more useful companion. Big challenges when building applications dependent on other peoples' servers include effective testing, caching, surviving third-party service outages, and good ways of integrating your interface code into your application.
Lip service is paid to the need to be prepared for a third-party service outage, but no examples of how to survive are offered. It wouldn't have been hard to illustrate ways of falling back to local databases or to secondary services, but none is offered. There's no mention of writing tests, so no opportunity to offer ways to use mocks to test the local code or to discuss how you might automate your testing of the integration itself, and caching is similarly overlooked except in the case of amazon e-commerce services where it is used to preserve historical data that amazon doesn't make accessible.
The absence of testing really shows through in some of the code offered. Much of the code demonstrated in the book is overly complex and procedural, with little in the way of modular, reusable components. Similarly there's little by way of discussion of where such code fits into your rails application, with some classes that are clearly models (albeit non-ActiveRecord models) dropped into the lib folder, and numerous very fat controllers.
Rather than covering seven separate projects, this box would have been much stronger had it focussed on two or three, but worked through them in significantly more detail. Possibly there wouldn't have been a chance to touch on as many services, but by building up one of the more diverse systems like the ticketing application in detail, covering failover, testing, clean integration with a rails app, and other such topics this could have been a much richer book with appeal for a far wider range of developers. As is, it's worth skimming through if you're looking for advice on sending faxes or SMS, but won't help much with the real challenges of building a robust application that's dependent on third-party services.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.Ruby on Rails Web Mashup Projects: A step-by-step tutorial to building web mashups Overview

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Review

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Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) ReviewI have a confession to make. Over more than twenty years as a programmer I'd never really had my head around object-oriented programming. I started out using C and then tried PHP and Perl and treated both as purely procedural languages (indeed, one Perl guru looked at my code and said "you were a C programmer weren't you"; humbling). Java, JavaScript, C++ and even Objective C had their turn at getting me to convert but none took (though I do code JavaScript under sufferance) until Ruby. A few month ago I started using Rails and became hooked on it and the underlying language. My Rails and Ruby skills have progressed in leaps and bounds. I've already had a good read of "Programming Ruby" and "Agile Web Development with Rails" and enjoyed and learnt from both.
I also have to admit to loving the O'Reilly "Cookbook" series. Several, particularly the "Perl Cookbook", have pride of place on the bookshelf closest to my computer. So the "Ruby Cookbook" by Lucas Carlson and Leonard Richardson was eagerly awaited. The "Cookbook" series are designed to provide you with a plethora of code examples to guide you in writing your own code. I'm definitely a hands-on style of learner and the Cookbook series suits my style - I can start getting my hands dirty with complex problems knowing I have help to code my way of out of the tight spots. This one covers a wide range of tasks from simple, such as walking a directory tree or manipulating text and numbers, through to more complex such as working with AJAX in Ruby on Rails. If you have't previously come across a book in this style then each chapter is broken up into a number of 'recipes' with a problem, a solution and then discussion of the solution.
This sort of book lives and dies by two criteria - the quality of the code and the usefulness of the recipe selection. "Ruby Cookbook" wins on both. The topics covered are wide and leave little, if any, part of the language unexplained. They start with data and structures such as strings and hashes before moving on to code blocks, objects, classes and modules. There is then an intriguing chapter on reflection and metaprogramming that I am still puzzling through before the book moves on to more internet based topics such as XML, HTML, web and internet services and, of course, Rails. The book then proceeds with chapters on the necessary housekeeping of development such as testing, packaging and automating tasks with Rake before finishing with extending Ruby with other languages and system administration tasks. The code is well written; clear and well commented, easily understandable by a virtual newb like me. The discussion is fairly clear, seemingly concise while allowing you to understand the code and how it might be changed for particular purposes.
I'm not going to go into more details as to the contents but instead point you to the book's page at O'Reilly which includes a link to the contents, listnig all the recipes in the book, and two example chapters; Chapter 7 on code blocks and iteration and Chapter 15 devoted to Rails. Together they will give you a good feel for the style and contents of the book.
The book is well written and well edited. I've already tried over a dozen of the recipes and haven't found a single code error, so my faith in the other 300 or so has risen considerably. The discussion that accompanies each recipe is a marvelous way of learning just that little bit more about the language. I found them quite good, though the odd one could do with further explanation if the book is to stand on its own - for example the discussion accompanying the recipe to iterate over a hash was not perfectly clear on the difference between Hash#each and Hash#each_pair.
At more than 800 pages this is a large and extensive volume, though the price may make you wince. Usually programming books this large have at least part of their size dedicated to something I refer to as pseudo-padding, some sort of reference or simple language explanation - this one has neither, all of it is devoted to the recipes.
With Ruby use, thanks in no part to the popularity of Rails, growing by leaps and bounds I'm sure this volume will be a well deserved bestseller. I give it four stars and recommend it to all but the most expert Ruby programmers. For beginners who, like me, appreciate hands on learning it is a must.Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) Overview

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