Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

The book provides some good information, besides important useful tips for the programmer.

However:

- Has several errors (redaction and description of the example code do not correspond with the code that is written).

- Themes and some points within the themes jumps from here to there, with no consideration of the reader. (Several readers are accustomed to have more order in the reading, example of this unordered stuff happen in the Active Record chapter).

If you have some Ruby and Rails background it can be useful, if this is your first book on Ruby, it deserves considerable refinement, there are other better options out there.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

good book

I thought this book was well planned and very informative for a beginner that has been trying to learn RoR for some time.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

This book has not earn good reviews, but I think it's a misunderstanding here. The main goal of this book is not to cover RoR in an intermediate nor advanced detailed level, but to give the user a fast overview of what RoR is all about. Remember that this book was released in 2005/2006 almost along with the RoR framework initial release. IMHO the authors accomplished their goals at that particular time.

A friend of mine recently (now it's 2008) ask me if I could indicate a good beginner's RoR book and I could not think of another with this simplicity. Unfortunately, probably because of the bad reviews, we don't have 2nd, 3rd, nths editions of this book :-(

Another thing why I like books like this when learning a new technology is because since it's new thing, I may decide that for any reasons I don't like the technology, I will not adopt it and in the end I didn't spent my time with a book full of details. In the beginning of my learning curve I need a good overall book so I can get the idea and that's what books like this one are made for.

So O'reilly, please issue the updated edition of this book covering the new things in the Rails Frmrk.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

I hava a 2006 version of the book, and it might as well be a older as it's mostly useless. What a tough field to write for - cool today, sucks tomorrow. I should have known better than to by a book that wasn't of the same year as I was living. 2006 was so long ago!

This would be a good book if more he examples and statements were still valid.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

Only chapters 3 through 7 are on line. The books starts with running the code for chapter 1, "rails chapter-1".

There are many different options for installing Rails. The author does not recommend one that he recommends for following along.

When I try ruby script\server for the chapter 3 source code, I get an error that I need to used the previous version of Rails. So I do gem install -v=1.1.2 rails I run ruby script\server again and get a cryptic



C:\rails\src-start-chapter-4\photos>ruby script\server

./script/../config/boot.rb:28: undefined method `require_gem' for main:Object (NoMethodError)

from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require'

from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require'

from script/server:2



This all very annoying. I'm going to look else where to getting "Up and Running" with Rails. If I can find the receipt, I'll return the book. This is an unusually book O'Reilly Book.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

Sorry but I'm returning this book. It is not up to the standards that I have come to expect from O'Reilly books. It is out of date, and much of what is presented in Chapter 4 did not work, I did not bother to continue on to chapter 5 when the downloaded examples did not work. I understand that there were major changes to Rails since the book was released and on the forums there is much carping that little notice was given about the updates but there is a limit on how out of date a book can be, this book exceeds that limit.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

I caught a number of typos which caused command line directives to fail. I suspect that a lot of later problems are related to versioning. I failed to be able to decipher the problems around chapter 4 since the scaffolding doesn't work for me and the downloaded solutions fail too.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

This book started out very strongly, but it's age starts to show after about 50 pages.

The book seems to be written for an earlier version of the framework and is in need of being refreshed.

Unless you feel comfortable discovering the example-spoiling changes on your own, avoid the first edition of this book.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

I like this book because it is short, thin, and to the point. It gives me just enough information to get started. The examples worked fine until I tried the drag & drop one.

This is probably not the place to ask a question like this. But, please let me...

The error from drag & drop operation:

Processing SlideshowsController#add_photo (for 10.71.1.169 at 2007-10-10 14:44:43) [POST]

Session ID: 253902577ac03cf8a5c6393c3721dade

Parameters: {"action"=>"add_photo", "id"=>"photo_3", "controller"=>"slideshows"}

[4;35;1mSQL (0.002208)[0m [0m SELECT a.attname, format_type(a.atttypid, a.atttypmod), d.adsrc, a.attnotnull

FROM pg_attribute a LEFT JOIN pg_attrdef d

ON a.attrelid = d.adrelid AND a.attnum = d.adnum

WHERE a.attrelid = 'slides'::regclass

AND a.attnum > 0 AND NOT a.attisdropped

ORDER BY a.attnum

[0m

[4;36;1mSQL (0.000436)[0m [0;1mBEGIN[0m

[4;35;1mSlide Load (0.000000)[0m [0mRuntimeError: ERROR C42804 Margument of WHERE must be type boolean, not type integer Fparse_coerce.c L818 Rcoerce_to_boolean: SELECT * FROM slides WHERE (slideshow_id) ORDER BY position DESC LIMIT 1[0m

[4;36;1mSQL (0.000429)[0m [0;1mROLLBACK[0m

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid (RuntimeError: ERROR C42804 Margument of WHERE must be type boolean, not type integer Fparse_coerce.c L818 Rcoerce_to_boolean: SELECT * FROM slides WHERE (slideshow_id) ORDER BY position DESC LIMIT 1):

........

Based on the above error, the problem seems to be with the generated select statement.

SELECT * FROM slides WHERE (slideshow_id) ORDER BY position DESC LIMIT 1)

Instead, it should be:

SELECT * FROM slides WHERE (slideshow_id = 3) ORDER BY position DESC LIMIT 1)

I also tried the following:

>> slide = Slide.find 1

>> slideshow = slide.slideshow

>> slideshow.slides.first.move_to_bottom

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: RuntimeError: ERROR C42804 Margument of AND must be type boolean, not type integer Fparse_coerce.c L818 Rcoerce_to_boolean: UPDATE slides SET position = (position - 1) WHERE (slideshow_id AND position > 1)

Same kind of problem. The update statement should be like:

UPDATE slides SET position = (position - 1) WHERE (slideshow_id = 3 AND position > 1)

I am not sure how to correct this problem. Please help.

Comments about oreilly Ruby on Rails: Up and Running:

I understand this was a light 'quick' start to Ruby on Rails, but this book was not worth my time or money. This is RoR, right? It's exciting & sexy. Everyone has seen David Hansson's "Creating a weblog in 15 minutes" presentation--this book made ASP look like fun.

I was hoping for a quick and exciting read for people who are used to web application programming with some sort of MVC framework. What I got was a choppy, boring, and mechanical 130 pages that walked through one example several times. It felt like this book was hastily written to cash in on the new wave of Ruby on Rails books.

...and then there are the numerous errors in the examples...