As this was the only "intro" book out yet (in hard copy) for Ruby on Rails 2.0 when I purchased it, I really didn't have a lot of choice. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing, the level of explanation and the pace of the hands-on tutorials.

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is a very powerful framework for building database-backed web services, but it definitely a little more unwieldy for the first timer relative to perl, PhP or other interpreted languages. "Hello world" is not going to cut it - there is a lot of intellectual content to absorb before you can see the forest for the trees. Simply Rails 2 did a good job of helping me get over that ramp as quickly and efficiently as possible.

At this point I am on chapter 4 of this book. I have tried "Beginning Rails", which was out dated and rather than adding what you need to their site, they just told you how to get an outdated version of Rails on your PC. That book was very bad, see my review on the book's page here on Amazon.

This book is everything someone like me, and artist with HTML and CSS knowledge needs to learn Rails. I am going to break this down so you know what you are getting into:

Chapter one is a history of Ruby and Rails, which sounds unneeded, but I have found these chapters the most helpful, as it allows the opportunity to get to the author(s), If you cannot get through the history chapter on a book about anything, you will not get into the rest of the book (MHO). This one read very well, and I learn a lot about both Ruby and Rails.

Chapter 2 Gets you started. It gives a very good walk through on getting Ruby, Gems and Rails installed. My only issue with it is that I am an Ubuntu (Linux) user, and I am not a computer geek, so when they said things like "If you are using Linux you should know how to..." I did not and had to look for help. Their walk through for Mac and Vista looked much more detailed though. I have tried (and failed) to install RoR on my OC before, and this was the first time it really worked. ([...] Linux users if you are having an issue getting things installed). Then you build your first site, or the skeleton at least, and you get to look at it on your web browser, so you feel like you did something.

Chapter 3 will take you a day to get through, and you need to set aside the time (IMHO) to do so. This chapter is why I am giving the book 5 starts, it is all about Ruby. Many RoR books I have seen want to skip Ruby, or deal with it later. This is bad, as you do not understand Rails as well without knowing something of Ruby. This book holds your hand, and walks you thought it. Even if you are an completely new coder using Windows, this book goes the extra mile to help you get it and I have learned more from this chapter than I have any other book so far (I own 10 Ruby or Rails books).

Chapter 4 gets into Rails, and it starts with the right and wrong thing. It is good that they chose SQLite, as that is what Rails uses, however, I have no clue why Rails uses it, as MySQL seems to be the web's fav (I could be wrong). It is what all of my web hosts and clients use. I know it is too much to ask, but I wish they would have gone over both. You will go over theory, ActiveRecord, ActionPack REST code generation, actionmailer, testing and debugging. This will get you started.

If you are a web designer who only knows HTML or just someone beginning to learn to code and you want to get your feet wet with Rails, this is the book to buy. I have tried many books and really wish I would have started with this one. You will still need to get some books on Ruby and/or more advanced books if you want to be a hard core Rails developer, but this is the perfect beginners book.

Using this book for my class, find it is easy and detail for a beginner in RoR!

I have read the forward and the first three chapters of this book. I am not all the way through it yet. However, thus far it has been the most enjoyable technical book I have yet read. I have learned several languages from books, and this book teaches you how to program in a fun way. The book is written more like the instruction manual for a video game than it is written like a programming textbook.
As I wrote before, I am only three chapters in, but I am excited to keep going. The book makes Ruby feel like a fun and exciting language and I am looking forward to the next chapter.

This book is useful for those who need to be taken by the hand, and taken step by step. After going thru the book, you have built a simple web site, but are not able to build your own. If you are brand new to Ruby on Rails, this may be your starter book, but will need to follow up with Agile Web Development with Rails.

THis is one of hte best beginner web app books i have ever seen (I've read books on rails, PHP , django, Zope, but not too much on .NET, ASP or java). The author takes the approach that he will introduce one coherent topic at a time thoroughly, with as little source code as possible, without digressions, exceptions or comparisons to other languages (perl, PHP, java). This he does admirably.

If i had to comment on the books limitations, i would say that there are a lot of topics that are glossed over: CSS, regular expressions, security. e.g. page 175, "regexs are confusing". I would've said that regex's are important in rails: validations, generating URL slugs, etc, and there are a lot of good resources, and also verbose mode to make them more readable. The book is pretty well indexed but "regular expressions" doesn't appear in index. p 329, you're shown how to take user input and display back in view *without* sanitizing. This is absolutely something you do not want to show in a beginner rails book. There's no mention of XSS, SQL injection, other security issues in the book, as far as i can tell. Something analogous is on p 258, where plain text passwords are stored to database, along with text that says this is not a great practice. The text should say "If you try to put this code into production, you'll probably be fired".

When you finish reading this carefully, you still won't know enough to look up issues in teh Rails Way book, which is where a aspiring Rails developer needs to be to find work. The book doesn't provide the next steps, e.g. never mentions the most often used rails plugins, ImageMagick, acts as solr/ferret, restful_auth, etc, doesn't mention any browser issues or DBMS issues. (Chap 10 covers acts_as_taggable on steroids pretty thoroughly)

But for somebody who's never done web apps, this book would have a much high comprehension rate than most others (the Dummies rails book was good, but now outdated). So for target demographic, highly recommended.

I would also say that the book's ruby overview is kind of inadequate (rails books either do a handholding ruby in 25 pages chapter, or a detailed view of metaprogramming, gotchas and edge/corner cases). I prefer the latter (as in Ediger "advanced Rails" and Rappin "Professional Rails", both superb books)

THis is one of hte best beginner web app books i have ever seen (I've read books on rails, PHP , django, Zope, but not too much on .NET, ASP or java). The author takes the approach that he will introduce one coherent topic at a time thoroughly, with as little source code as possible, without digressions, exceptions or comparisons to other languages (perl, PHP, java). This he does admirably.

If i had to comment on the books limitations, i would say that there are a lot of topics that are glossed over: CSS, regular expressions. e.g. page 175, regexs are confusing. I would've said that regex's are important in rails: validations, generating URL slugs, etc, and there are a lot of good resources, and also verbose mode to make them more readable. The book is pretty well indexed but "regular expressions" doesn't appear in index.

When you finish reading this carefully, you still won't know enough to look up issues in teh Rails Way book, which is where a aspiring Rails developer needs to be to find work. The book doesn't provide the next steps, e.g. never mentions the most often used rails plugins, ImageMagick, acts as solr/ferret, restful_auth, etc, doesn't mention any browser issues or DBMS issues.

But for somebody who's never done web apps, this book would have a much high comprehension rate than most others (the Dummies rails book was good, but now outdated). So for target demographic, highly recommended.



I would also say that the book's ruby overview is kind of inadequate (rails books either do a handholding ruby in 25 pages chapter, or a detailed view of metaprogramming, gotchas and edge/corner cases). I prefer the latter (as in Ediger "advanced Rails" and Rappin "Professional Rails", both superb books)

This book is a great start, but you won't be able to write applications in Ruby on Rails by the end of it.

Let me refine that: you will be able to write one Ruby on Rails application by the end of it. The book walks you through creating a program that works like Digg. The book explains well everything that you need to do to write this one program, and introduces you to the basics of RoR architecture and how RoR works. I followed the instructions and understood everything that was going on.

However, once you have finished this book and written your Digg-like program, there is no guidance for where to go next. There isn't a chapter on "Further Resources" or "Where to go from here" or anything at all - you're just stuck with your little Digg-imitation. Not only that, but the book tends to introduce information in a rather haphazard order. From a pedagogy standpoint, the order in which information is presented makes a lot of sense. But it makes the book useless as a reference manual, or even as a model for how to do your own project.

It's fine as a first step and as an introduction to Ruby on Rails, especially since at the moment it's the only thing in print about Rails 2.x. But you will have to read other books before you can be a competent RoR programmer.

I am new to programming. I did a lot of it back 20 years ago, but am new to object oriented programming and just starting to learn programming again. I am about 1/2 way thru the book and have found myself now reading other books (Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper is one) to try and fill in the blanks. The book takes the approach of developing a web application from the git go. I like this approach, but it glosses over WHY we are doing it. I found myself wondering why, more than saying "oh yeah, that makes sense". Maybe the fact that I am new to this wonderful programming world has a lot to do with it, but the book calls itself the "the ultimate programmers guide" so I guess I expected more from it. Overall it is an OK book, but the Agile book by Dave Thompson seems to do a better job of walking thru developing a web app.

Although I have been writing programs for quite a while I am completely new to Ruby and Dynamic languages in general. I have been checking out a few books on Ruby and Rails. Rails is what I am really after. But most books are either 'Ruby only' with no rails and 'Rails only' and assume you already know Ruby. I tried 'Ruby for Rails' but it is out of date and doesn't cover rails 2. So it looked like I had to bite the bullet and finish a ruby book before picking up a good rails book. I was making my way through the famous 'Dave Thomas' classic. It is a great book but I was wondering if there is a faster way to get to rails. And finally I found it!

This book is a simple,easy and fast route to rails. I am not new to the basics of object oriented programming covered at beginning of the book but I think this book contains one of the best introductions to the subject for beginners.

If you want to get into rails 2 and if you are quite new to ruby as well then this is the fastest and easiest route I have seen. And it looks like you don't need to have lots of coding experience to use this book.

I had high hopes for this book, being that it was strongly recommended here on Amazon. However, I have quite a few issues with it.

First, no one should be teaching anyone how to develop a web application if they're not willing to explain how to hash sensitive data like user passwords. There's really no reason not to. This is basic, basic security and it's simple to implement in rails, yet the authors choose to go the clear text route. (Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition teaches you how to do this, and at 700 pages, is a much more useful resource for the beginning Rails developer the version that covers 2.0 is available as a beta-ebook online).

Also, I don't think the authors were able to bridge the gap between their assumed level of knowledge and the true Ruby on Rails beginner; explanations of OOP were slim and basics like symbols and MVC aren't clear enough (ie, jargon words like "business logic" might be understood by some readers, but not all beginners). Again, I had to go to other books to get clear examples and explanations written entirely in lay terms.

If you want a complete resource that will let you teach yourself Ruby on Rails, this isn't it.

I was very happy to finally find this book after much confusion and disappointment weeding through the huge number of Rails tutorials, postings, and books including the beta Agile Web Development With Rails 2.0. By the way, if you are new to Ruby, and I assume to Rails, get this book. The people behind the so-called authoritative AWD book are still scrambling to update their book to 2.0, and if you are like me new to Rails and Web development frameworks in general, you will have a heck of time trying to make sense of the various components that make up Rails, the deprecated syntax. Unlike 'Agile Development with Rails' book, 'Simply Rails 2' starts you off with an introduction to Ruby and the theory behind the framework in concise and clear language. I recommend this book highly.

This book is excellent, if you know nothing of Ruby on Rails, and know very little of other programming languages.

It is a book to introduce you to Rails (and Ruby) without going into too much of the technical aspects.

This will in no way make you proficient at developing Rails applications, however, it introduces you to the fundamentals (especially testing) of rails with which you can go and watch screen screencasts, follow tutorials or read other books on rails with a basic understanding of the process.

I do NOT recommend this book to anyone trying to further along their Rails training (nor is it intended for that).

I DO recommend this for anyone who has picked up a rails book or watched a screencast and blindly started to regurgitate the code that is being taught without understanding what it is supposed to do. This book will explain it.

A (free) tutorial with which I recommend in conjunction with this book is:
[..]
This tutorial goes into gory detail over (nearly) every basic step that you need to know to start your Rails apps.

I have read nearly 10 books , plus countless screencasts and tutorials (mostly outdated due to Rails 2.0) on Rails and Simply Rails 2 is by far the most up-to-date and easy to read for a true beginner.

I have to concur with the previous reviews on this site. I'd been searching for months for a good Rails 2 book, and, at last, I have found one. It doesn't start with a massive, unwieldly tutorial, one that throws everything at you at once ("look: scaffolding! look: helpers! look: I'm horribly lost! :-) but actually takes the time to coherently explain the underlying structure, and builds on that explanation step-by-step.

The diagrams are great -- if anything, the book could use more, e.g., showing the tie between controller actions and views.

If I were to teach a course in Rails -- and I very well might -- this would be my hands-down choice.

If you need to learn Rails, Simply Rails 2 is simply the best out there.

This is an excellent way to start learning about rails with 2.0 and above. Unfortunately, many of the older tutorials and books will break with with 2.0 and above, which is a shame because they contain good information. I'd advise anyone who is learning Rails to start with this book. Once you have the basics down, you can switch to more advanced books and articles.

I also give top marks to Patrick Lenz for making testing such a big part of the book. He doesn't just recommend testing, or give it a cursory treatment, he works testing into every chapter. He walks the walk, and it's pretty great.

While I'm giving the book five starts, it actually does lose a quarter star in my book by integrating AJAX into the application before the concepts have been introduced with simpler forms. Don't get me wrong, I really like AJAX, and I think it's presented very clearly so the treatment of AJAX itself gets top marks. But I think that it would be better to introduce one to many and man to many with forms without the distraction of AJAX, and then work in the UI improvements later.

Small complaint for such a good book, though, and not enough to go below 5 starts. If you want to learn Rails 2.0, this is your book.

Programming (and logical thinking in general) is definitely not my forte'. I consider myself much more of a designer, but I was still really interested in learning Rails so I could build AND design my own web applications.

I haven't finished the book yet, but after reading the first few chapters I have to say it is an amazing book. This, combined with watching some content from [...] has given me a really good introduction to Rails and I'm confident that I'll have a very decent grasp of it within a matter of months.

This is THE book to get if you want to learn Ruby on Rails.

Simply Rails 2 is a real gem among Rails 2 books at the time I am writing this review. The reason is simple. There are no other introductory books that are up to date with Rails 2.x. At least none that I am aware of.

The author and editors managed to create a unforced yet detailed tutorial that will lead you through all you need to know to start building Rails applications. It will not make you a guru by any means, but no book will do that unless you combine them with numerous blogs and screencasts.

This book delivers more than I expected frankly. Although it is a tutorial, excellent technical editing makes it a light reference full of useful code snippets. Almost all examples are thoroughly examined, line by line. You will find a lot of hints along the way, some more obvious than others.

It provides a introductory coverage of many aspects you will have to deal with when developing Web 2.0 applications (AJAX and REST among others). Ruby is covered just enough to get you started with what a simple Rails application demands from you.

All in all, a great book and it is much much more than just a space filler before AWDWR is updated.
5/5

I am new to Ruby and of course Rails. I found Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) book very useful to learn Ruby. Unfortunately I had difficulty finding a simple and clear book on Rails, till I found Simply Rails 2. Rails uses convention over configuration and could be quite confusing and a bit mysterious for someone coming from traditional .NET or Java backgrounds. Patrick Lenz does an amazing job demystifying Rails and even making it a pleasure to learn. The clarity of this book resulted in several aha moments and insights for me. By the time you finish the book, you will know how to create a useful REST based resources oriented test driven web application.

I found downloading the code from companion website and working through the step by step Rails 2 Digg like sample application very useful. If you are new to Rails and like step by step books, this one is definitely for you.

Amongst the plethora of Rails books, only a few cover 2.0+, and even fewer do a decent job of it. This book covers Rails 2.0.2 incrementally from the ground up, and there's even a decent intro to Ruby for those completely new to the language.

Patrick Lenz thoroughly covers the basics, RESTful routing, plugins, testing, etc., and also teaches several tips, tricks, and shortcuts of the trade...things that you may not easily deduce by reading the API. Practically every concept covered is matched with hands-on exercises while developing the book's application. The code is accurate and virtually errata-free.

There were only a couple of times that I had a question. I emailed Patrick, he responded literally within minutes, and was very helpful!

I have read several Rails books. Yet this is only the second book I've read that truly practices what it preaches about testing (and the other was Patrick's first version for Rails 1.2.x: Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications).

If you want to learn Rails, or already know Rails pre-2.0 and want to get up to speed on the new features and functionality of Rails 2.0+, or finally commit to proper testing, buy this book and take the time to work through and understand every exercise. I think you will be very glad you did.