Well it’s official – I signed the contract earlier this week, and started work on a new Rails book that will be out this fall.

This one will be a Beginning Rails 2.0 book, so I thought I’d toss out a quick thread here on the forums to gather any feedback from you guys that you’re willing to share.

1. Are there areas in Rails development that you wish were better explained to you in the beginning of learning Rails. Or areas that you feel aren’t covered well by other books?

2. How did you feel about the code-centric learning process that I tried to use for the Rails projects book?

3. Were there things about the previous book that you felt just didn’t work and should be avoided for the next one?

4. Anything else you would like to see in a Beginning Rails 2.0 book?

Thanks

1) Yes! The move from CRUD to RESTFul development has changed many things about how apps should be structured, and there are also the controversies in the deep-nesting vs shallow-nesting tribes. So something that would be great to understand better as a Rails newbie is how to structure applications in relation to the user activities. For instance, should I partition my app into two groups, one that is totally RESTful and essentially represents the items they present, and another group that presents HTML pages to users in ways that are very convenient to the users, but maybe not so RESTful? Another issue is how to deal with the lack of components—while there is a push to make apps look like their data model, my customers want apps that are convenient, meaning that a single page may include many different views of many models all at the same time. With components being deprecated, how do I structure something that customers like but is still Railsworthy? These are the kinds of questions that I have found most difficult.

2) It is excellent! However, please make sure that the illustrations and figures match the code purported to produce them. For instance, on Page 406 of your book, you have code for an EXTJS layout that may in fact match just the layout component of figure 18-3, but there is a bunch of stuff in figure 18-3 that doesn’t appear in that code. Rails has been a huge experiment in determining (an remembering) which expressions yield which results, based on defaults, hidden functionality, etc. There isn’t anything for theme support or a library in that code—so my natural Rails paranoia about defaults was applied to this example. Lost a lot of time as a result.

3) It was hard to follow some of the folded lines in the examples—I would use a smaller font for code to eliminate as many folded lines as feasible.

4) It would help to know what one needs to do to convert a pre-2.0 app to 2.0, particularly WRT the apps in your previous book. Also, indications as to which of the burgeoning rails 2.0 sites are the best to monitor—like everything else on the net, the signal to noise ratio is pretty low. Anything that points to resources that helps one write, upgrade and generally maintain an app across Rails version upgrades is great!

I liked your book quite a lot—it is one of two that I use almost every day when coding.

-r

I know it’s a bit late for this. Your “new” book, Foundation Rails 2, is out. (Is there a web site for it?) But just in case you’re willing to write yet another one ;).

1. Working with multiple versions of ruby/rails.

2. Running multiple rails apps.

3. Accessing more than one database from a single app.

4. Working with non-rails-convention databases.

5. Non-trivial examples.

6. Database structuring.

This might be a good one for you with your background and ties in with #4. How do we employ good database design. Or how do we design our models such that good database design follows naturally from them? This probably requires one or more non-trivial applications since.

6. Test First Development

Very few, if any, books on rails I’ve seen seem to want to touch this. If rails is opinionated, and this is one of the things it’s opinionated about, it should be start from the outset. How do we write tests, and which tests do we write. Isn’t there a way to make writing tests fun? I would LOVE to see a rails book that shows how to write the tests as an application is constructed.

7. Documentation

Sort of goes hand-in-hand with #6 I think. Books on rails, even beginning ones, should come right out teaching how to document the code from the start, not as sort of an afterthought, if at all. That’s my opinion ;)

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