Initial chapters of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book

[Michael Hartl]

Hi all,

I recently released the first four chapters of the Ruby on Rails
Tutorial book I've been working on. The main project page is at
http://www.railstutorial.org/, and you can find the book itself at
http://www.railstutorial.org/book. Any feedback on the book or help
spreading the word would be greatly appreciated. And much thanks to
the many people on this list who have given me words of encouragement
on this project.

Cheers,

Michael

--
Michael Hartl
http://michaelhartl.com/
http://blog.mhartl.com/

[Matt Aimonetti]

The book looks great Michael, keep up the good work.

- Matt

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[Xavier Noria]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:55 AM, Michael Hartl
<mic...@michaelhartl.com> wrote:

> I recently released the first four chapters of the Ruby on Rails
> Tutorial book I've been working on. The main project page is at
> http://www.railstutorial.org/, and you can find the book itself at
> http://www.railstutorial.org/book. Any feedback on the book or help
> spreading the word would be greatly appreciated. And much thanks to
> the many people on this list who have given me words of encouragement
> on this project.

Awesome Michael!

Looks well-done and very promising.

[Vahagn Hayrapetyan]

Hi Michael,-

I own your RailsSpace book and have used a snippet or two from it in my first Rails app, FunctionalGyms.com (http://functionalgyms.com/).

However, when developing the app I chose to rely more on Alan Bradburne's "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites". The reason for that is that in my opinion, Alan's way of developing the app was 1) more modular (every iteration / chapter is a self-contained web app in itself); 2) more REST-based.

So if I had a wish for your new book it would be those two points - more modularity in the example app and REST conventions throughout.

Other than that, it looks promising and I'm looking forward to seeing it :-)

Cheers,
Vahagn

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 12:55 AM, Michael Hartl <mic...@michaelhartl.com> wrote:

[Michael Hartl]

> However, when developing the app I chose to rely more on Alan Bradburne's
> "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites". The reason for that is that in my
> opinion, Alan's way of developing the app was 1) more modular (every
> iteration / chapter is a self-contained web app in itself); 2) more
> REST-based.

Thanks for the comments. The goals of RailsSpace and Alan Bradburne's
book were quite different, and it was our fault for not making the
difference clearer. RailsSpace was designed as a general tutorial for
beginning Rails programmers, whereas Alan's book was aimed
specifically at building social networks and assumed that readers
already knew Rails. When building a specific kind of app (and when you
can assume prior Rails knowledge), modularity makes more sense; for a
tutorial aimed at beginners, an integrated narrative structure is more
effective.

As for REST, when we started RailsSpace there wasn't even REST support
in Rails! Indeed, it was terribly frustrating to have RailsSpace come
out just in time to be swept away by the REST revolution. Nowadays, of
course, REST is standard, so the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book will
definitely use the REST architecture where appropriate (which is
basically every chapter after chapter 4).