Crafting Rails Applications: Expert Practices for Everyday Rails Development

by José Valim

Rails 3 is a huge step forward. You can now easily extend the framework, change its behavior, and replace whole components to bend it to your will, all without messy hacks. This pioneering book is the first resource that deep dives into the new Rails 3 APIs and shows you how use them to write better web applications and make your day-to-day work with Rails more productive.

Rails Core developer Jose Valim guides you through seven different tutorials, each of them using test-driven development to build a new Rails extension or application that solves common problems with these new APIs. You will understand how the Rails rendering stack works and customize it to read templates from the database while you learn how to mimic Active Record behavior, like validations, in any other object. You will find out how to write faster, leaner controllers, and you'll learn how to mix Sinatra applications into your Rails apps, so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the job. In addition, you will improve your productivity by customizing generators and responders.

This book will help you understand Rails 3's inner workings, including generators, template handlers, internationalization, routing, and responders. With the knowledge you'll gain, you'll be ready to tackle complicated projects more easily than ever before, creating solutions that are well-tested, modular, and easy to maintain.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Software, Nonfiction, Computers, Technical, Web

180 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2011

Reviews

[Barbara Krein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book. I LEARNT a lot from this book.

[Philip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book about the internals of Rails! I learned a bunch of how to use some pieces together to create better applications. This book changed my view that Rails is too much coupled: it is much more flexible than I thought. Highly recommended for those who want to learn more about Ruby on Rails and its internals.

[Anton Antonov · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an effortless and straightforward read. I read it shortly before EuRuKo 2016, where I met Jose Valim in person.

The book goes from start to end with minimal paragraphs of text, which is a refreshing trend sometimes. The examples are easy to follow. Over the course of the book, you build a Rails application to help you understand Rails 4 better.

It's by no means an end-to-end comprehensive expert guide. It's a follow-along type of book that shows you Jose Valim's way.

N.B., it's dated. You missed the opportunity to use it. Now that 7.x.x is the latest version, the book is not applicable. Sorry, you missed it. 🫡

[Jan Toth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Must read if you want to see under the hood of Rails, definitely not book to learn Rails from, I'd recommend book to every intermediate Rails developer.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really advanced stuff for people who are ready and itching to dig into Rails internals.

The examples were a bit too contrived for my taste. Several didn't have any reason to exist other than to show off the guts of Rails, and the author even admitted that you'd have been more likely to solve a problem in a more straightforward, simple manner.

It's information-dense enough that I found it to be kind of a slog, though I did like the way chapters were organized, tying several deep Rails concepts into a single feature to develop.

I did learn 3 or 4 things (like respond_with) that I'll certainly use again, leaning on this book as a reference.

Altogether, I'd probably have rated this more highly if I'd become bored with building things the same way and wanted to dig into seriously advanced Rails-fu. As it is, I couldn't recommend it for beginning or even intermediate Rails devs.

[Jacob Tjornholm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. José Valim makes some pretty advanced stuff look simple, not least by test driving his way through the book. Recommended for anyone who want to create Rails engines, renderers, generators or similar, and for anyone who simply want to know more about the internals of Rails. It's a quick read but each page contains valuable stuff, there are no boring passages.

The table of contents is a bit misleading because most chapters actually cover a lot more than the main topic.

Also, I enjoyed how this book inspires the reader to take a closer look at the source code of Rails (by including some of it in the book).

Be sure to check the Ruby Rogues' coverage of this as well in episode 48 where José is a guest.

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book covers Rails for intermediate programmes and offers many useful insights. Unfortunately it didn’t caught my interest. Rails 4 in Action is more my kind of book when it comes to Rails 4.

[Karim El-Husseiny · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most interesting book about Rails internals. The author (Jose Valim) has an excellent understanding of Rails internals and infrastructure and does a great job to break down and simplify the advanced concepts. I highly recommend this book to Rails intermediate developers who want to write their own plugins or gems.

[Dane · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read which delves into rails internals. While I found the information hidden in this book quite valuable, it was a bit rambly and the examples were a bit contrived. I feel it could have been 100 pages shorter and still held the same value.

[Ignacio · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to know about Rails internals, this is your book. Some of the examples are not recipes that you'll ever directly need, but the explanation shows many interesting details. Other books are nothing but sugar on top of the official tutorials. This one digs much deeper.

[Oleksandr · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not easy book.
It is really deep book on Rails internals. It helped me understand responders and translations in Rails.
I used techniques I found in book in current projects

[Xavier Shay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good reference if you want to go anywhere near the Rails APIs with plugins.

[Sai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Getting your feet wet in different parts of the Rails stack in a super fast tracked pace. It can be a little out of context, but it makes up for that by trying to touch upon a lot of topics

[Serge Seletskyy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not enough to master Rails but it could be a good start for newcomers.