<pre>
Author/s : Christian Hellsten, Jarkko Laine
Publisher : Apress
Category : Other
Review by : Johannes de Jong
Rating : 10 horseshoes</pre>
Once in a while a book gets written that makes your life as a programmer easier; this book is one of them.
Why you might ask? Well to start off with I can use +/- 60% of their demo application, emporium, as a basis for a application I've started writing; and my application has absolutely nothing to do with a book store. Their application addresses common tasks i.e. standard CRUD, security, multiple language support etc. things you will encounter in any web-based application. They show you how to solve them the Rails way.
I've never fully understood the fuzz about the Test Driven Design and I thought that writing test code before writing the actual code meant you were bananas. I know better know. If you follow their advice and example, boy do they write a lot of test code in their application, releasing your code to production won't be the dreaded �gone is my weekend� event it used to be. Thank you for showing the way guys.
I also like their writing style, it is as if you are part of the discussions with the user, George, as the application evolves from an idea till a pretty sophisticated amazon type clone. Everything is done using extensive user stories and you fully understand their reasons for their solution to the problems.
Even though this book is not a reference book I'm quite sure I will return to it often when writing my own application(s) to see how the authors did something. As such I have one small gripe I wish the formatting made it easier to find things.
This book has everything you need to take your level of understanding / knowledge of Rails to higher level and as a bonus it will also make you a better programmer general; I highly recommend this book.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk [ December 11, 2006: Message edited by: Johannes de Jong ]
[ December 11, 2006: Message edited by: Book Review Team ]
