A Book on Rails

In the past few weeks, I've been developing an web application based on Ruby on Rails. One book was always on my side: Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. My copy is full of post-its and handwritten notes.

It's a very good, well-written book. The authors start with a simple shopping site example and enhance the application to near-production quality. Then, they walk through the different parts of Rails, and close with some advice on how to deploy Rails applications. I found the latter to be the most informative chapter by far.

Having been written cooperatively by many authors, the book has some slight inconsistencies. The shopping site application has some pages where the authors use href links to point to URLs that delete items from the shopping cart. A couple of hundred pages later, there is a warning in huge font that advises to use submit-style buttons for this, as they generate HTTP POST requests.

Also, I felt like some topics had been left out. Web designers often use standard web site elements such as menu side bars and trails:

Home > Category > Subcategory > You are Here

I feel like there should be a standardized solution to create page hierarchies in Rails, but the book doesn't really deal with that. (While I was quickly able to hack up something, I'm not quite satisfied with my solution.) Also, I'd like to see a chapter about internationalization in the next version.

On the other hand, Ruby in Rails isn't really trying to be everything to everyone. So maybe it's a good thing to leave some things out.