Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd edition - Book review

About time for another book review: Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd edition, written (mostly) by Dave Thomas.

The book shows you all facets of developing a Rails application. This is actually a big improvement over the first edition. That one did not even talk about migrations. There have been a lot of changes in Rails, and these are reflected in the second edition.

Just like the first edition, the second edition is well written and has the same structure: the first chapters walk you through creating a new application, the latter chapters provide more insight in the separate building blocks of Rails. Unfortunately the book never really goes to the bottom of things (though its pretty good in the Active Record area); there is simply too much to cover. So this book is probably not a good buy if you are already an experienced Rails developer and are prepared to find information about new Rails features on the internet.

So although it took me a couple of months to read this book from cover to cover, my conclusion on this book is short: this is a must-have for any new Rails developer.