Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
“Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial by Michael Hartl has become a must-read for developers learning how to build Rails apps.” —Peter Cooper, Editor of Ruby Inside Using Rails, developers can build web applications of exceptional elegance and power. Although its remarkable capabilities have made Ruby on Rails one of the world’s most popular web development frameworks, it can be challenging to learn and use. Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial, Second Edition, is the solution. Best-selling author a
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Best tech book I’ve ever read,
Also – most, if not all of the 1 star reviews you see are due to the printing error of the book. It is due to the publisher, and out of Michael’s hands.
What are you waiting for ? Grab yourself a copy, and thank me later 🙂
Update Dec 10, 2012: I just wanted to pop in and say that the learning experience produced some fruitful results. After learning Rails from this book, I created an internal website as part of my job and received a lot of praise. I love Rails now, and I really hope Michael comes out with an “Advanced Rails” book. I’d be one of the first in line to grab it.
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Extremely well written, great for beginner,
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Some book stores still selling old, uncorrected version of the book,
Michael Hartl has been extremely helpful in getting me up and running again with a correct copy of the book. He has provided a stellar example of customer service. It has been a pleasure to do business with him.
It is clear that the bookstore where I purchased this is selling a very old, uncorrected version of the book. While the copyright says 2013, that copyright is a typo in the original 2012 print run.
Hartl has contacted the publisher and informed them that not all recalled copies were indeed recalled. Hopefully, they’ll be able to track down any remaining bad copies and replace them.
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I just bought the 2013 reprint of this book. It’s probably a great book, but it has a VERY SERIOUS flaw, making the book entirely unusable.
It is missing the angle brackets, double-quotes, single-quotes, vertical bars, and backslashes from all code samples, and is missing the underscore character in the body text. The result is a *completely* unusable book. If you don’t know which characters are missing from a sample, typing in that sample code and running it will result in code that won’t execute, followed by a guessing game to try to make it run. Since this is a book for beginners, the chances of most beginners being able to make the correct guesses are nil.
As an example, there is a snippet demonstrating the difference between two strings – one using single quotes and one using double quotes. The type of quotation marks used is significant, because it determines what you need to enter for backslash characters. Here’s what it looks like in the book:
Newlines ( n) and tabs ( t) both use the backslash character .
Newlines ( n) and tabs ( t) both use the backslash character .
As you may note, a reader might have some difficulty determining which of those lines has single quotes, which has double quotes, and what the difference is in backslashes between the two.
Similarly, the following is what a typical code sample looks like (sorry, Amazon strips out the indentations, so it’s a bit harder to read than it should be):
html
head
title % = full_title(yield(:title)) % /title
% = stylesheet_link_tag application , :media = all %
…
/head
body
%yield%
/body
/head
/html
In the above, there are 26 missing angle brackets, and possibly some missing quotes, some of which may be single, and some of which may be double, but you can’t tell unless you already know the syntax of the language that you bought the book to learn.
Every single code snippet in the book is similarly unusable, and the explanatory text accompanying it is often wrong due to missing underscores in references to file names or variable names that should have underscores. So far the text appears to be clear, but after 130+ pages of guessing what’s missing from the code, I’m having a hard time feeling motivated to continue.
The reprint needs to be scuttled and re-reprinted, ensuring that the fonts used are compatible with the printer, so that all the characters appear. A replacement copy from the publisher would be nice…
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