Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (Addison-wesley Professional Ruby) 4th Edition

Of several recommended texts for the Coursera "Ruby on Rails Web Development," I chose this one after a brief read of the first few pages of each book. This text will get you up-to-speed relatively quickly on its subject. I have the advantage of programming experience in several languages, though I am no expert programmer. Nonetheless, this tutorial takes you step by step through the development process in a logical and pedagogical manner. With some computing and programming skills, one should be able to follow along easily.The use of "technical sophistication" as a pedagogical method is praiseworthy. It allows one to develop important skills, techniques, and understanding of the material along the way. And, after all, this is what one needs from a tutorial, right. Highly recommended.

I have done multiple Rails tutorials online, all of them were great for getting an app up and running but they all have left me wondering "well...I made an app, but what did I actually just do?". Not this one, I am up to Chpt. 7 in the book version and already I have a deeper understanding and better sense of clarity of how Rails works and what I am doing to make it work then before. The testing of the sample app as I make progress in this tutorial is a huge part of why I am beginning to really understand how Rails works. No other tutorial that I have done ever even mentioned testing or Test-Driven Development. Great tutorial, thank you!

The content of this book is awesome. So I highly recommend reading this book to get started in Rails.However, the eBook is UNUSABLE. It is FREE online at railstutorial dot org, so why did I just pay $30? Not only that, but you CAN'T CUT AND PASTE when using Kindle on PC or on the kindle cloud reader, which in a programming book, is a hellish nightmare. Never again will I buy a programming book on Kindle. I bought the book and am using the free online version anyways, so I can cut and paste. Thus, I immediately "returned" the eBook and got my money back.It's not his fault that Kindle sucks for coding books. But I'm not really sure why it's being sold for >$30 when it's free online. Doesn't seem right. That's why i'm giving 4 stars, and not 5.

Extremely in-depth for a Ruby-on-Rails tutorial book. Dives you deep into critical, complex features of RoR with example projects (you get to follow along and build yourself) that you can visualize being used in industry-leading scenarios. Very professionally written, edited and published with fantastic quality. Text is easy to follow for a beginner, but also complex and detailed enough for the serious IT professional using this as a primer into RoR. I would highly recommend this as being a top book to have if you're getting to Ruby on Rails for your own development/experimentation, or if you're an IT professional, as a primer into more complex RoR topics after running through this.

No human actually looked at the final typeset book: the table of contents & significant bits of the text are unreadable because most of the letters are left out for text set in certain styles. For instance, in the table of contents all the chapter titles are mangled. First title is typical:F om Z o o D loyThis was meant to be from "From Zero to Deploy". This goes on all through the book. I understand that bugs happen but that is why we have humans.One can guess past the errors but this is just inexcusable.

Great book to learn Ruby on Rails, building simple apps before diving into the full one helped me get familiar with the Rails framework and some of its capabilities.Learning languages and learning web development are two different things and the latter is done through this book very well. I recommend both for anyone looking to learn software development. Especially if you want to become a fullstack developer.

Great MaterialI've been in the IT industry for about 10 years but I have been avoiding programming for quite some time. I've heard about Michael's book from following Derek Sivers and it doesn't disappoint.The material builds up your skill set in a very methodical way. I have learned so much and I'm only half-way through the material.The material in this book has given me the confidence, that with hard work and great reference materials, I can definitely become an engaged and proficient programmer in Ruby.

I brought this based on the 5 star reviews. As a teaching/tutorial book it is fantastic, the guy knows his stuff and knows how to impart the knowledge. The concept of publishing even baby apps to the web is fantastic, and the constant use of git puts good practices in your fingers. Which brings me to why only 3 stars.Every chapter we start on a new git hub branch, and rather than post that branch for reference to git hub, one is FORCED to type reams of small print code into ones editor. This causes the reader to spend far to long chasing typo bugs instead of learning the excellent material. Copying printout into the computer is so 1980s it hurts. Imaging if you could go to the latest branch and check your work against that. Some might say well do it against the final version, but when your on chapter 5 the final version is so far ahead of where your at it makes tracking down the differences and how they map to the chapter you are on as complex and error prone as typing from the book.I'll be returning this, shame as the book has great information and teaching