Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional (Rails)

this book is an excellent introductory book to ruby on rails. i read chapters 1 through 9 (out of 13) for now, for work. i read _agile web development with rails_ as my first rails book, and although that was also a good book, i would highly recommend _beginning ruby on rails e-commerce_ first before _agile_ to a rails newcomer, especially to one looking for a gentle introduction, and/or may feel rusty with past programming.

_beginning ruby on rails e-commerce_ is very readable. the story that you follow to build an online bookstore flows naturally and easily. the order/presentation of the material covered to learn about for rails from how to set up controllers, models, and views to installing plug-ins and gems needed to integrating a bit of ajax-related tools is extremely organized and well done.

getting an authorize.net account can take a few/several days, so i recommend requesting one online about a week before you anticipate working through chapter 9: checkout and order processing.

there are several typos, some easily noticeable and others not, some that do cause problems if you didn't know about them. therefore, it would be a good idea to follow along with the errata online available at the apress site in a browser tab as you work through the book. i myself submitted about a dozen typos that were not included in the errata at the time of this review.

overall, this book is very well done. there haven't been many technical books i have read that i have been thrilled with, and this is one of those few. i went through a shared work copy, and anticipate purchasing a copy for myself soon.

Would've been a good book without spending half of it focusing on the jargon of their own methodology called "user stories" or some silly crap like that.
Good software always meets the same stages of development regardless of the flavor-of-the-month name or metaphor for the same crap.

That said, the book is otherwise absolutely sound, full of good information. And would be great if you weren't being distracted by their strange methodology naming.

While I really hate to slam down the authors of the book, this text really offers nothing to readers that isn't in better form elsewhere. The text is ridden with buggy code, incomplete explanations, and the style of coding leaves much to be desired. The "Agile Web Development with Rails" text (also available on [...]) builds nearly the same application (an eCommerce site), but does so while explaining the rails framework as well as offering up a solid reference textbook style for later use.

I teach graduate level computer science, and switched my curriculum to Ruby on Rails this term for my "Complex Websites" course. I reviewed many books, and this one ended up at the bottom of the pile. Sorry.

It's too bad this wonderfully written book is so full of errors. Did the authors run out of time to check the sample code? I spent days and days trying to get the sample code given in the book to work. The book version of the code didn't match the downloaded version and both were loaded with errors. After chapter four I gave it up as a lost cause. My list of errata was so extensive that I didn't bother to send it to the publisher because I had invested far too much time in the book already. I'm guessing the rave revues this book received were from readers that simply read the book and didn't try the sample application code.

Overall, I really liked the book. It targets Rails 1.1 for the most part, so you won't learn 1.2-specific goodness like RESTful architecture and block-yielding form helpers, but it presents a wealth of information and does so in a very readable way. From payment gateways to full-text search, to I18N and L10N to Capistrano, you'll find it a great resource for launching your own e-commerce site in Rails.