Bulding Rails apps, buy this and read it cover to cover first, you will be amazed at how many issues have been solved for you. The book is comprised of a selection of ‘full’ recipes (sort of full plans to achieve something – like versioning) and snack recipes (hints on improving your code – postback actions). I would say I will probably use around 50% of them within the next couple of months.
There are a few which should probably appear in the development books as they provide such a great way of doing things it should be taught as standard:
- DRY Up Your Databse Configuration
- Cleaning Up Controller with Postback Actions
- Make Your URLs Meaningful (and Pretty)
- Creating Dynamic Test Fixtures
- Polymorphic Associations
To name a few. Other recipes that stood out particularly are the two dealing with the ‘acts_as_taggable’ and ‘acts_as_versioned’ plugins. These are features that are pretty ubiquitous in the ‘World 2.0’ and the discussions here (alhough short) provide a great intro to the concepts behind the plugins and might just open your eyes to some new ideas.
All in all, this has without a doubt been the most useful addition to my collection of Rails books / ebooks so far and I would strongly advise anyone to have at least a flick through it before embarking on any non-trivial Rails application.
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