If you haven’t taken advantage of the fact that Patrick Lenz’s introductory Ruby On Rails book is available as a FREE PDF, then you better act quickly as there are only three days left!
There’s plenty happening in the world of Rails development, and even before this giveaway I was of the firm belief that this book is the best and easiest way to get up to speed on the Ruby On Rails framework. Plenty of other books assume that you are an experienced web developer who is already writing unit tests and adhering to best practice MVC principles in some other programming language.
Not in this book. Patrick holds your hand through the basics and sets you up with an example application that, once complete, will give you a solid foundation from which you can further your Ruby and Rails skills.
Did I mention there are only three days to go? Seriously, go get it now. Even if you file it away for later.
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I saw that comment a few times before. Do you think it’s better than “Agile Web Development with Rails”? If so, why?
November 28th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Hi nico7799
The books serve two very different markets. I guess when I said “plenty of other books assume that you are an experienced web developer who is already writing unit tests and adhering to best practice MVC principles” I really was talking about the Agile book. It’s certainly the most comprehensive guide to Rails out there, but if you’re just starting out and are not familiar with the terminology or the concepts, it can be enormously daunting and leave many of the basics unexplained.
A lot of the feedback we’ve had about our book is that it provides a solid foundation and does a good job of explaining these basics. And many of the customer reviews explicitly mention that they used this book as a starting point before moving on to the Agile book. I’d suggest that this is a very good path to follow.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:10 am
Great, thanks for the explanation. Im actually reading both, so i wanted to see how it compared with Agile.
November 29th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Interesting marketing strategy. I received Design View #40, dated 1-6-2008 at 3:32, which had the link to this page with the legend, “Free Rails PDF: Only 3 Days To Go!” Upon arriving and clicking the download link I find, instead, the book for sale. Somewhat offputting, that…
January 8th, 2008 at 3:45 am
It’s a bit hard to avoid. That newsletter was sent around December 15th. I’m assuming you got a copy of it on the 6th of Jan because that was when you subscribed, and you automatically get a copy of the last edition upon subscribing.
It’s a bit like subscribing to a magazine and receiving the current edition immediately for free. You get some good reading, but you can’t necessarily expect all the contests and offers in it to still be valid.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:24 am