Rails Recipes - Chad Fowler
August 6th, 2006
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.
