What do you think?
Rate this book
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails
“ Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial by Michael Hartl has become a must-read for developers learning how to build Rails apps.” — Peter Cooper, Editor of Ruby Inside Using Rails, developers can build web applications of exceptional elegance and power. Although its remarkable capabilities have made Ruby on Rails one of the world’s most popular web development frameworks, it can be challenging to learn and use. Ruby on Rails™ Tutorial, Second Edition, is the solution. Best-selling author and leading Rails developer Michael Hartl teaches Rails by guiding you through the development of your own complete sample application using the latest techniques in Rails web development. The updates to this edition include all-new site design using Twitter’s Bootstrap; coverage of the new asset pipeline, including Sprockets and Sass; behavior-driven development (BDD) with Capybara and RSpec; better automated testing with Guard and Spork; roll your own authentication with has_secure_password; and an introduction to Gherkin and Cucumber. You’ll find integrated tutorials not only for Rails, but also for the essential Ruby, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL skills you’ll need when developing web applications. Hartl explains how each new technique solves a real-world problem, and he demonstrates this with bite-sized code that’s simple enough to understand, yet novel enough to be useful. Whatever your previous web development experience, this book will guide you to true Rails mastery. This book will help you
600 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 2012
127 people are currently reading
412 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
May 14, 2016
HO.LY.SHIT. I have been working on this for MOAR THAN 3 YEARS WTF. I'm so amazed that the app and exercises still held together after everything around it was getting deprecated. Like Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 3.2.3..... Whatever!!! It freaking works. https://fierce-garden-1508.herokuapp....
I had to restart my dynos to do the last push to Heroku, but what is the fun in app development without spending hours on Stack Overflow?
I am so happy to never look at this book again.
But thank you Hartl, for your service.
I had to restart my dynos to do the last push to Heroku, but what is the fun in app development without spending hours on Stack Overflow?
I am so happy to never look at this book again.
But thank you Hartl, for your service.
March 1, 2016
This book is a fantastic example of a "learn by doing" book. It is just about the perfect blend of explanation and exercises. What I appreciated the most was that it took a simple app (a Twitter clone) and treated it like a very real project. What that means is it covers everything including installation, development environment, source control, and testing. The tools it has you use are high quality but completely free, and they're tools that one might actually use in a professional environment. As a guy who studied web development in college, and worked professional on a Rails project, and even done the entire Ruby series on Code School, I still found the content of this book very helpful. It's nature as an end-to-end tutorial meant many gaps in my knowledge were being filled in.
The only drawback is perhaps that this is written assuming no prior knowledge. So while the topics get advanced quickly, there are spans that are going to great lengths to explain fairly basic concepts like SQL queries or CSS selectors. People with a good amount of experience might find these bits tedious, but I was able to get through just fine. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Rails but doesn't yet feel comfortable starting a project from scratch.
Michael Hartl has generously made this book available online for free:
https://www.railstutorial.org/book
The only drawback is perhaps that this is written assuming no prior knowledge. So while the topics get advanced quickly, there are spans that are going to great lengths to explain fairly basic concepts like SQL queries or CSS selectors. People with a good amount of experience might find these bits tedious, but I was able to get through just fine. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Rails but doesn't yet feel comfortable starting a project from scratch.
Michael Hartl has generously made this book available online for free:
https://www.railstutorial.org/book
November 30, 2015
This is how all tutorials / introduction courses should be written or conducted.
This book doesn't only demonstrate the major features of the framework, it also tackles other aspects of professional Rails app development such as: writing unit/functional/integration tests for the app using TDD, deploying on a production environment (Heroku), app security, app maintainability, debugging your app using the console, and designing your code so that it conforms to the "Rails Way". The concepts are explained in detail, easy to follow for a complete beginner, and provides a firm grasp on how a Rails app works "under the hood".
If you're interested in learning Rails, this book is an excellent starting point.
This book doesn't only demonstrate the major features of the framework, it also tackles other aspects of professional Rails app development such as: writing unit/functional/integration tests for the app using TDD, deploying on a production environment (Heroku), app security, app maintainability, debugging your app using the console, and designing your code so that it conforms to the "Rails Way". The concepts are explained in detail, easy to follow for a complete beginner, and provides a firm grasp on how a Rails app works "under the hood".
If you're interested in learning Rails, this book is an excellent starting point.
February 12, 2016
Good start!
August 26, 2019
I am a pretty good programmer with lots of experience--none with Ruby or with Rails. This was a quick way to get up to speed quickly.
November 25, 2015
Great introductory level Rails book. The exercises are many and interesting enough to keep the reader coding for a some hours. They're all about writing missing tests for the code and don't introduce new functionality. That's for the best due to the fact that the book is targeting novice Rails developers.
However Rails Tutorial has many code mistakes (resulting into errors) in a lot of places resulting into extra hours of debugging. That's a positive for me since I can debug and learn more, but for others it's an instant reject for this book.
Either way Michael Hartl in his 3rd edition of The Ruby on Rails tutorial did a great job at helping me learn Rails and have a good foundation to write a more advanced Rails application in due time.
However Rails Tutorial has many code mistakes (resulting into errors) in a lot of places resulting into extra hours of debugging. That's a positive for me since I can debug and learn more, but for others it's an instant reject for this book.
Either way Michael Hartl in his 3rd edition of The Ruby on Rails tutorial did a great job at helping me learn Rails and have a good foundation to write a more advanced Rails application in due time.
November 6, 2015
I am a programmer with 10+ years of experience. Though I was more like a client guy, and only started learning server side on this year. And here's what I learned: I couldn't be able to find a book about Rails better than this one. There are books which says something contradicting Rails guide, which sample code just didn't work.
This book teaches you how to build a site, put on descent layout, and deployment from very early part of the book till the last. I can't tell if the author is a master programmer or not, but at least I can't find any major erroneous conception on this book (and yes, I saw these on other books). So if you are looking for book to learn Rails, pick this one.
This book teaches you how to build a site, put on descent layout, and deployment from very early part of the book till the last. I can't tell if the author is a master programmer or not, but at least I can't find any major erroneous conception on this book (and yes, I saw these on other books). So if you are looking for book to learn Rails, pick this one.
October 2, 2015
One of the greatest learn by example books I've read in programming. The book is really a long tutorial, but he has the appropriate level of details for each chapter. I just loved this thing and wish he could write on for Python/Django or MEAN.
The material was presented in a really clear way and his methodology of forcing you to use TDD when necessary, deploying to Heroku and using different topic branches are all things that I don't really see covered that well in other tutorials, but are essential developer skills.
Also he's really good with updating the book, I thought I found a potential issue and Michael replied in less than 24 hours.
The material was presented in a really clear way and his methodology of forcing you to use TDD when necessary, deploying to Heroku and using different topic branches are all things that I don't really see covered that well in other tutorials, but are essential developer skills.
Also he's really good with updating the book, I thought I found a potential issue and Michael replied in less than 24 hours.
March 7, 2016
So this was the first time i've ever tried Ruby on Rails. And i really like it.
I'm not quite sure if that language is so good that i enjoyed every chapter or it's Michael Hartl that writes like he's your actual tutor behind your back telling you what to do and what to try.
The book is good. Perfect for beginners. Huge part of it was about testing, i'm not quite sure that every reader expects that, however it's one of the approaches to build something(write test, then write programm) and we need to respect that.
I'm not quite sure if that language is so good that i enjoyed every chapter or it's Michael Hartl that writes like he's your actual tutor behind your back telling you what to do and what to try.
The book is good. Perfect for beginners. Huge part of it was about testing, i'm not quite sure that every reader expects that, however it's one of the approaches to build something(write test, then write programm) and we need to respect that.
June 21, 2015
Perhaps the best place to start learning Ruby on Rails for experienced web developers.
November 24, 2022
This is a good introduction to Ruby on Rails. It walks you through the creation of a few very simple projects then focuses on a pretty sophisticated application with user creation/management/editing and posting/following activity. You learn how to do this in a development environment on your own machine as well as how to deploy to production using Heroku (which might be an impediment to some now that Heroku has discontinued their free tier, but the deployment to production is not a major part of the project and you may just use the development version to experience and play with all the functionality). Along the way you are introduced to concepts like Model-View-Controller (MVC), GitHub, Test Driven Development, and Ruby. It helps to have some knowledge of programming but I think a very motivated beginner could get quite a bit out of this book. The code is very well proofread in my experience (but watch out for the YAML formatting) and there are online GitHub repositories that you can consult with all the code from the book in them. My only complaint is that the author will occasionally introduce something, like JavaScript, and use it in the application being built, but then he will say, don’t worry, you don’t need to understand this in depth. Consequently, you will have elements in your application that you don’t really understand very well or even at all, which I guess is fine in this learning environment but if something goes wrong it could be very frustrating to figure out how to fix it. Apart from that this is an excellent and seemingly very popular (it’s in its 7th edition and has been around for many years) introduction to Ruby on Rails.
November 13, 2022
I read roughly half of this book while working on a job-application assignment to create a Rails app. The book was extremely helpful, especially for someone with prior experience in most concepts but no experience with Rails. e.g., someone shifting from one language to another.
The book is packed with enough pictures and examples to teach you how most things work spontaneously. And it is very will written in that regard, giving special attention to references and extra reads.
That said, I can't help but see that what happened to be this book's greatest strength for me must also be a great weakness for someone lacking that prior knowledge. You might find yourself shitting fully-functioning Rails apps in no time but without understanding half of what you are writing.
If you are looking for a book to teach you how to use Rails, then look no further, for this is your Holy Grail. If you are looking for a book to teach you Rails, however, then I am afraid I have seen many collections of 1000 pages that were better spent.
The book is packed with enough pictures and examples to teach you how most things work spontaneously. And it is very will written in that regard, giving special attention to references and extra reads.
That said, I can't help but see that what happened to be this book's greatest strength for me must also be a great weakness for someone lacking that prior knowledge. You might find yourself shitting fully-functioning Rails apps in no time but without understanding half of what you are writing.
If you are looking for a book to teach you how to use Rails, then look no further, for this is your Holy Grail. If you are looking for a book to teach you Rails, however, then I am afraid I have seen many collections of 1000 pages that were better spent.
January 4, 2018
The author considers his book as an introductional tutorial, which it's definitely not.
I was a bit disappointed first as it goes into too much detail on the basics of web development and Rub y the language, but then I got enlightened. This book is called "Introduction to Web Development with Ruby on Rails", therefore it doesn't expect its reader to have any experience with RoR, Ruby or web dev whatsoever.
This book allows its reader not only to grasp the basics, it empowers him to do apps that's are production ready without any prior frontend experience. Javascript is not very well covered though. However, in the world of RoR that doesn't matter that much.
I wish I had read a book like this before. Unfortunately, the heyday of RoR has been long gone, but this doesn't make this book any worse.
This book is a must read if you're thinking to touch any RoR project.
I was a bit disappointed first as it goes into too much detail on the basics of web development and Rub y the language, but then I got enlightened. This book is called "Introduction to Web Development with Ruby on Rails", therefore it doesn't expect its reader to have any experience with RoR, Ruby or web dev whatsoever.
This book allows its reader not only to grasp the basics, it empowers him to do apps that's are production ready without any prior frontend experience. Javascript is not very well covered though. However, in the world of RoR that doesn't matter that much.
I wish I had read a book like this before. Unfortunately, the heyday of RoR has been long gone, but this doesn't make this book any worse.
This book is a must read if you're thinking to touch any RoR project.
January 26, 2018
By far, this is the best tutorial I've taken for any programming language. It's the perfect jumpstart to Ruby on Rails where he teaches you as you code. He even equips you with some basic Ruby syntax and concepts along the way.
It's even free to read online! (I bought the book because I wanted to support this wonderful work and know I'll be referring back to it often, as I jump into my own projects.)
https://www.railstutorial.org/book
Word of advice: walk through it exactly as he does it, and take notes for yourself along the way! You will use many of these techniques/features again and again.
It's even free to read online! (I bought the book because I wanted to support this wonderful work and know I'll be referring back to it often, as I jump into my own projects.)
https://www.railstutorial.org/book
Word of advice: walk through it exactly as he does it, and take notes for yourself along the way! You will use many of these techniques/features again and again.
January 10, 2019
This was the beginning of my Ruby Developer career so my review can be subjective, as I still have some indulgence.
But this is one of the best books I can imagine for learning both RubyOnRails development and Web Development. Here, you will find RubyOnRails app development, writing proper tests and even some SQL. As a bonus, you will get GIT and Heroku deployment so you can show your app to everyone.
As minus I can say one thing, its Rails-centric, you can learn some antipatterns and not real-world habitats.
But this is one of the best books I can imagine for learning both RubyOnRails development and Web Development. Here, you will find RubyOnRails app development, writing proper tests and even some SQL. As a bonus, you will get GIT and Heroku deployment so you can show your app to everyone.
As minus I can say one thing, its Rails-centric, you can learn some antipatterns and not real-world habitats.
June 16, 2017
This is an awesome and meaningful introduction to ruby on rails programming, with an example from start to finish that is a reasonable level of complexity, instead of the usual toy app. I can see myself referring to this book, and the code for the app I built step-by-step while reading it, many times in the future. Well done.
partially-read
May 22, 2018I was watching the video course on Safari Books for this book (watched 7 1/2 lessons of 12). In my opinion the author could have edited some of those videos and removed parts where he was typing sample data or just fighting bugs in "real time". That would have made those videos a little bit shorter.
This book has a format that is not my personal choice: someone building a random application in order to explain things. I prefer to be walked through core concepts and join the dots in a later moment.
Positive points for this book: it gives notions of integration testing, production deployments and even GIT, so it might be an excellent fit for someone who has little experience in software development.
This book has a format that is not my personal choice: someone building a random application in order to explain things. I prefer to be walked through core concepts and join the dots in a later moment.
Positive points for this book: it gives notions of integration testing, production deployments and even GIT, so it might be an excellent fit for someone who has little experience in software development.
April 27, 2020
Excellent. As a beginner it was worth doing the learn enough series of tutorials before hitting this. I didn’t always know what or why I was doing certain things, but I now know what’s possible with rails. Highly recommended.
November 3, 2017
The best development book I have read. It's available online for free now but it's worth purchasing (the latest edition) if for no other reason then to support Hartl's amazing work.
January 30, 2018
Великолепный туториал.
October 2, 2018
Best book to learn ROR from scratch. To get maximum output combine the learning with Railscasts by Ryan Bates.
March 9, 2023
So helpful! Thanks!
The Unglitch
https://unglitch.io
The Unglitch
https://unglitch.io
April 5, 2018
An excellent introduction to full-stack web development with Ruby on Rails, and a perfect example of the "learn by doing" methodology. Exactly how programming should be taught.
November 25, 2015
RoR Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails (4th edition) is the one I've read.
I think it's the best Rails introduction. The book is a lengthy, well-formatted and informative introduction to the Ruby ecosystem and Rails.
It explores Ruby, the Ruby ecosystem (gems, bundler and rbenv), Rails and a bit of SASS and CoffeeScript.
During the course of the book, Hartl and the reader create a Twitter clone and explore SASS and CoffeeScript in the process. It's a very slight SASS and CoffeeScript introduction, but enough to get you excited about them and learn more on your own.
There are very few things taken for granted during the course of the book. The usage of gems is reduced as much as possible in order to push the reader to write as much as possible from scratch without relying on built solutions.
What I liked the most is the exercises and questions after each chapter. They're practical and really push the reader into learning the concept better. The focus on TDD is something that is a core Ruby ideology and Michael Hartl does a good job at passing the idea to the reader.
Overall it's a 4.5 / 5 for me.
What makes it less than a complete 5 is the unfortunately noticeable amount of hours I spent debugging the Rails code and examples. During my read I was really unfortunate with the compatibility between gems and new versions hit and some were unsupported for a bit. It required digging through Github issues to fix the problem before gem authors react (which is more than I could afford). The extra work I had to do made the read less enjoyable than I would've wanted it to be. While it's not the author's fault completely, it's something that might require an extra look through all the code examples in the book and making sure they're all up-to-date.
Maybe an extra focus on RSpec would've been something that would push it to a solid 5.
I think it's the best Rails introduction. The book is a lengthy, well-formatted and informative introduction to the Ruby ecosystem and Rails.
It explores Ruby, the Ruby ecosystem (gems, bundler and rbenv), Rails and a bit of SASS and CoffeeScript.
During the course of the book, Hartl and the reader create a Twitter clone and explore SASS and CoffeeScript in the process. It's a very slight SASS and CoffeeScript introduction, but enough to get you excited about them and learn more on your own.
There are very few things taken for granted during the course of the book. The usage of gems is reduced as much as possible in order to push the reader to write as much as possible from scratch without relying on built solutions.
What I liked the most is the exercises and questions after each chapter. They're practical and really push the reader into learning the concept better. The focus on TDD is something that is a core Ruby ideology and Michael Hartl does a good job at passing the idea to the reader.
Overall it's a 4.5 / 5 for me.
What makes it less than a complete 5 is the unfortunately noticeable amount of hours I spent debugging the Rails code and examples. During my read I was really unfortunate with the compatibility between gems and new versions hit and some were unsupported for a bit. It required digging through Github issues to fix the problem before gem authors react (which is more than I could afford). The extra work I had to do made the read less enjoyable than I would've wanted it to be. While it's not the author's fault completely, it's something that might require an extra look through all the code examples in the book and making sure they're all up-to-date.
Maybe an extra focus on RSpec would've been something that would push it to a solid 5.
November 13, 2012
This could be one of the best books ever written about software development. Certainly among the best I've read, and I've been through many.
The one gotcha of the book is that it plows forward rapidly, often through advanced software development concepts, and I fear that inexperienced or newbie developers will not be able to catch up.
Michael Hartl writes in a concise, clear and effective manner, both in text and code. He took me from zero knowledge of rails or ruby, to being able to work on my own project, where I find that I actually understand what I'm doing (most of the time).
While other books consider it enough to teach you code that shows some text in the console or run something from your local machine, Michael realizes that a modern web developer needs much more than that, and teaches you how to get your application to run on a real production environment, and backed up on a remote source control repository.
I also want to commend the book for being one of the precious few I've seen where Test Driven Development is introduced properly. Other books introduce test almost as an afterthought, in a manner that makes examples harder to read or code harder to follow.
Michael and Rails have scored a fan thanks to this wonderful book.
The one gotcha of the book is that it plows forward rapidly, often through advanced software development concepts, and I fear that inexperienced or newbie developers will not be able to catch up.
Michael Hartl writes in a concise, clear and effective manner, both in text and code. He took me from zero knowledge of rails or ruby, to being able to work on my own project, where I find that I actually understand what I'm doing (most of the time).
While other books consider it enough to teach you code that shows some text in the console or run something from your local machine, Michael realizes that a modern web developer needs much more than that, and teaches you how to get your application to run on a real production environment, and backed up on a remote source control repository.
I also want to commend the book for being one of the precious few I've seen where Test Driven Development is introduced properly. Other books introduce test almost as an afterthought, in a manner that makes examples harder to read or code harder to follow.
Michael and Rails have scored a fan thanks to this wonderful book.
December 7, 2013
I read this book online for a class and based on the layout of the website, I had pretty low expectations (especially since the topic is web application development). Thankfully, my expectations were exceeded by far.
The author assumes that the reader has very little web experience and over the course of the text, he introduces a lot of concepts. In that process, you will learn Ruby, a very expressive programming language, and Rails, a powerful web framework.
I like a lot about Rails. The framework is very full featured and even provides excellent tools for database migrations, which is something I don't often see. Rails follows an MVC pattern so the reader learns about data modeling, templates, business logic, and more.
My biggest criticism of Rails is that it appears to have too much "automagic." I would be afraid of subtle problems that arise in large web apps because of strange interactions with the implicit features of the framework. To the credit of Rails (and the Ruby community in general), there is a strong emphasis on testing. This may alleviate concerns about strange problems.
Overall, this is a very good introduction to the Ruby on Rails world.
The author assumes that the reader has very little web experience and over the course of the text, he introduces a lot of concepts. In that process, you will learn Ruby, a very expressive programming language, and Rails, a powerful web framework.
I like a lot about Rails. The framework is very full featured and even provides excellent tools for database migrations, which is something I don't often see. Rails follows an MVC pattern so the reader learns about data modeling, templates, business logic, and more.
My biggest criticism of Rails is that it appears to have too much "automagic." I would be afraid of subtle problems that arise in large web apps because of strange interactions with the implicit features of the framework. To the credit of Rails (and the Ruby community in general), there is a strong emphasis on testing. This may alleviate concerns about strange problems.
Overall, this is a very good introduction to the Ruby on Rails world.
January 8, 2015
Definitely a must read by any web developer. I read the 3rd edition online and coded every line of the examples of the book, unfortunalely is a very long book that would take you a long to digest. I would recommend that you have some experience in programming and to be very motivated because it has a lot of content. I spent more or less three weeka reading and coding the book.
You basically go through the development of a Twitter-like application and it's very rich in details. Every concept is explained. The book suggest the use of the on-line platform Could9 platform which is ready to use with a Linux platform(Ubuntu) and Rails installed. Cloud9 also provides a very nice editor. Is up to you if you want to use it or use VIM.
Personally I created a virtual machine on my PC and installed Manjaro Linux, Rails and VIM-Rails to have the best experience and I'm not dissapointed, I sharpened my skills with VIM and I'm looking forward to master this environment and tools.
You basically go through the development of a Twitter-like application and it's very rich in details. Every concept is explained. The book suggest the use of the on-line platform Could9 platform which is ready to use with a Linux platform(Ubuntu) and Rails installed. Cloud9 also provides a very nice editor. Is up to you if you want to use it or use VIM.
Personally I created a virtual machine on my PC and installed Manjaro Linux, Rails and VIM-Rails to have the best experience and I'm not dissapointed, I sharpened my skills with VIM and I'm looking forward to master this environment and tools.
January 15, 2016
Outstanding introduction to Rails. The author gets it done while stepping through his thought process and demonstrating test-driven-development best practices.
You'll build a fully functional twitter clone in this book and while exploring each part of the framework along the way.
As a bonus you'll learn to use a great cloud-based IDE which worked better for me than Sublime, you'll get a hands-on introduction to managing both the development and the production environment including pushing your progress to git and to Heroku.
I plan to return to another in-depth rails book "Agile Development with Rails 4". That was a good book but I needed more scaffolding. I think this book provided that.
You'll build a fully functional twitter clone in this book and while exploring each part of the framework along the way.
As a bonus you'll learn to use a great cloud-based IDE which worked better for me than Sublime, you'll get a hands-on introduction to managing both the development and the production environment including pushing your progress to git and to Heroku.
I plan to return to another in-depth rails book "Agile Development with Rails 4". That was a good book but I needed more scaffolding. I think this book provided that.
December 25, 2012
this book is really good for newcomers to ruby on rails, it puts beginners on the right track in the world of ruby on rails, Introduces you to git,heroku, bootstrap and other mandatory stuff in the world of rails nowadays, however this world is only for beginners, it will teach you how to create rails apps but not what happens in the background, you may find author writes code and skips explaining it to another chapter to run the example, i personally didn't like that, other people may have no problems with that, anyways its a good book for beginners, the book have chapter for ruby basics, but i recommend learning more about ruby before starting reading this book.
HAPPY CODING !:)
HAPPY CODING !:)
March 23, 2016
It was really good, from chapter 1 to 7, I was doing well then I couldn’t continue with the code examples, because of the Rails version 2.3 used in the book while now it’s 4.2.
anyway, I later created a new project with Rails 4 and then instead of doing it all, I got a suggestion to use the following gem:
devise, for users authentication
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise
Then I continued chapter 10 and 11.
I ended up with the same example, register user,sign in, sign out, crud posts for users.
I did also Chapter 11, and I'm still adding more features to the example.
Recommended for those who wants to start with Ruby on Rails.
anyway, I later created a new project with Rails 4 and then instead of doing it all, I got a suggestion to use the following gem:
devise, for users authentication
https://github.com/plataformatec/devise
Then I continued chapter 10 and 11.
I ended up with the same example, register user,sign in, sign out, crud posts for users.
I did also Chapter 11, and I'm still adding more features to the example.
Recommended for those who wants to start with Ruby on Rails.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews