OStatic

Although it's still listed as a beta book on the Pragmatic Bookshelf web site, Mike Clark's Advanced Rails Recipes is finished and getting ready to ship. Thanks to Pragmatic's excellent beta program for books (you get to read in-progress PDFs while the author is finishing the book), I've had plenty of time to work with this one already. My verdict: the book is a winner, and its very existence says good things about the growing Rails community.

Chad Fowler's original Rails Recipes book, released a scant two years ago, mustered contributions from about 15 authors. This follow-on volume has fifty contributors, making its claim to be co-authored by the Rails community a reality. Even more important than this evidence of a thriving group of developers is the fact that the 84 recipes contained in the book for the most part demonstrate extremely useful techniques. You will most probably not use all of them in a single application - but if you're writing Rails applications, this book is a chance to learn some useful techniques and see a lot of good code.

The recipes are organized into 14 sections, covering topics such as REST, Capistrano, e-mail, console use, databases, and testing. The focus is on Rails 2.0 and the tools are very current (though, like all books, this one will start to age now that it's released). One nice touch is that there are multiple approaches to the same topics here, thanks to the plethora of authors. For example, if you're thinking about full-text search, you can find examples here of using ferret, sphinx, or solr - and get some sense of the pros and cons of each one.

The book goes beyond the various introductory Rails books to demonstrate tools and techniques that are useful in full-blown applications. You'll see things like how to create multistep wizards, the use of the lowpro javascript library, hooking into Gmail, turning on SSL, and dealing asynchronously with long-running tasks.

If you're doing any sort of large-scale Rails work, but you haven't been around for years as the community worked out useful approaches to common problems, you should find that this one repays the $24 pricetag for the PDF version quickly.

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