Ready to transport your web applications into the Web 2.0 era? Head First Rails takes your programming -- and productivity -- to the max. You'll learn everything from the fundamentals of Rails scaffolding to building customized interactive web apps using Rails' rich set of tools and the MVC framework. By the time you're finished, you'll have learned more than just another web framework. You'll master database interactions, integration with Ajax and XML, rich content, and even dynamic graphing of your data -- all in a fraction of the time it takes to build the same apps with Java, PHP, ASP.NET, or Perl. You'll even get comfortable and familiar with Ruby, the language that underpins Rails. But you'll do it in the context of web programming, and not through boring exercises such as "Hello, World!" Your time is way too valuable to waste struggling with new concepts. Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Rails uses a visually rich format designed to take advantage of the way your brain really works.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

Finally a Rails book to begin with. - 2009-04-02
Reviewer Rating:
Over the last year, I have picked up a few books on Ruby on Rails but the information exits me as soon as it enters. Creating a Rails book in the Head First style is what I needed personally. This is a beginners book, but when a book is subtitled "A learner's Companion", one shouldn't expect anything advanced. For those who are looking for an advanced book, then they should check out The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez.

Ruby on Rails is an interesting and controversial framework, and is often difficult to get beginners help for. There are quite a few elitists who frown on designers and newbies like us trying to learn a framework, so we can make our designs more interactive. But you know what...Tough. There are countless cases where an engineer falls short at the CSS/DOM level and the designer has to take over. This leads to designers having to learn a bit of engineering....

The best thing to do is start at the beginning and practice a lot. Head First Rails covers a lot of projects (interesting) instead of just one (an easy way to lose interest).

In a nutshell, Head First books are designed for a certain type of person. Some don't understand, and complain about them..."theres a lot of pictures", etc... but they miss the point of the books. They're for beginners who want to learn fast and want to retain. They're designed as an educational experience and not a reference. For reference, there's plenty of books by O'reilly and Addison Wesely and others to cover that.

One reviewer here claims that this book teaches old conventions, i.e. the doesn't teach the RESTful method. This is not true. There is an entire chapter devoted to REST, and the project is mashing up a Google map. REST is a trendy term, and can be learned in an hour. As a matter of fact, it took about an hour to do the Google/Ajax map mashup in Head First Rails... sure beats the typical digg/fake bookstore projects in the other Rails books.

Head First Rails has been a joy to read. Its one of those rare books that I carry around with me. If you want to learn rails not just in the modern style but also historically (and thats a big deal, there's tons of Rails 1.x sites out there that need updating), this is the one to start with. After this book, i recommend learning Ruby itself, either in "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine (for beginners) or "Programming Ruby" by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt. After that, I reccomend "The Rails Way" as a reference by Obie Fernandez if you plan on staying in Rails. The Rails Way has everything one needs to know, but is definitely not for beginners. Start here.

Great rails book - 2009-09-24
Reviewer Rating:
This is the best Rails book I have picked up. It really explains what is happening within a rails application at each step of the process while you build - most other rails books simply have you build and application and hope that you pick up what is happening from the code that you are writing. Highly recommended!

Starts strong, finishes a bit vaguely - 2009-06-18
Reviewer Rating:
I'm ambivalent about the Head First series. I acknowledge the validity of the concepts behind it, but somehow I can't quite ignore the taint of condescension inherent in the format. Reading the Head First books always feels like a shameful and remedial act.

That said, this is the first Rails book that made complete sense to me. I read a couple of other Rails books out of curiosity, but although I got the general drift, there was still a significant chasm between reading the books and actually going out and building a Rails application. After Head First Rails, I did my next little project in Rails and everything worked out great. I got it.

My main complaint is that the second half tackles material that really has no business being in a Head First book. For example, several of the later chapters involve increasingly sophisticated mashups of the Google Maps API. This seems like a specialized and peripheral application to me, whereas the strengths of the Head First format are in conveying fundamental concepts. It's odd to have multiple chapters on Google Maps and nothing on the various flavors of many-to-many relationships supported by ActiveRecord, for example.

I really enjoyed the "inductive approach" - 2009-05-19
Reviewer Rating:
I have extensive experience in both structured and OO programming, but I had never tried the Ruby on Rails framework before - although this technology has been of interest to me for almost two years.

This is the reason why I decided to get a Rails book. I was happy to get "Head First Rails" and "give it a go".

It has been my first book of the "Head First" series. And I must admit I found this learning methodology to be brilliant.

The inductive approach consistently used throughout the book allows students to ask themselves questions and be actively part of the learning process. Starting from observations and examples, the student is encouraged to discover the rules behind this language (probably the term "conventions" is more appropriate).

In my opinion, the concepts that are learnt this way are more solid. I have to say though that this book is mainly targeted to students with good web design concepts and no Rails background. Although Rails has extensive and detailed documentation, I believe the inductive approach makes this book worthwhile.

After a very interesting and comprehensive introductory chapter, which allows users to rapidly create a small web application, the book explains what "scaffolding" is (a Rails technique for faster setup of conventional web applications), when to use it and when not to use it.
The book covers also database interaction (I really appreciated the examples on PostgreSQL, my favourite RDBMS) and CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update and Delete) on database records.

Throughout its 400+ pages, full of images and figures (necessary for the inductive approach), the book cannot extensively cover all the aspects
of an Object Oriented programming framework for web applications. Some aspects are just introduced (routing, validation, XML, REST). However, in my opinion, the book does not fail in helping readers get into Rails
for the first time.

I recommend this book, possibly with parallel readings from the official Rails documentation. Hence I give this book 4 stars (out of 5).

Excellent introduction - 2009-05-02
Reviewer Rating:
I've been interested in Ruby on Rails for the last couple of years. As a Computer Science grad, I didn't so much need a book explaining programming or concepts like object orientation. What I needed was a book explaining the mindset required for the RoR framework. And that is exactly what this book does. I agree with other reviewers; this book would be no good for reference, but it is a great way of getting into RoR. Enjoy.

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