A couple of weeks ago I picked up a “Rough Cuts” version of the Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini. This is the same book that was recently highlighted on the Ruby on Rails blog.
Almost immediately it started to pay for itself. I had a couple issues where I was trying to get my join model to be a sortable list but only keep track of a records position in the list constrained to one of the foreign keys. Well on page 117 there is a recipe for using acts_as_list that automatically manages the position of record in the model and takes a :scope => :model option to constrain the position field to keep track of a record’s position relative to the foreign key “model_id”. Each new “model_id” would behave as a separate list within the same model.
The recipe’s are logically organized and there are A LOT of them: 15 Chapters (560+ pages) dealing with every aspect of Rails you can imagine. While I prefer the writing style of Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes a bit more, the sheer wealth of information in this resource can not be understated. And the content spans subjects at various difficulty levels from “I built my whole app using scaffold!” to “I’m getting a free ticket to Railsconf.”
Two areas that were extremely helpful were in the areas on Active Record and RESTful resources. Since Active Record is the largest and arguably the most powerful part of rails , it’s really helpful to be able to leverage it’s features whenever possible. As they say, “Convention over configuration!” Also RESTful resources are brand new and as such there is not a lot of information out there to help you know how to best use them, so it is good to find resources that do.
Yesterday I got a book from my dad about Object Oriented Programing. It is called Object-Oriented Design w/ Applications by Grady Booch. A while back I started exploring OOP and found my head wrecked as I had no frame of reference. Most of my programming experience laid in PHP, C, & Shell scripting. After spending the last 6 months learning Ruby, I’ve come to understand Objects and OOP much more clearly, still I occasionally have conceptual problems with this style of programming. Well after reading only the 1st and 2nd chapters, I’ve gotten a simple nugget that helped my grasp where my problem was.
Continue reading ‘Object Oriented Design w/ Applications’
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While I’ve had the final version of the new 2nd Ed. of Agile Web Development with Rails in pdf for over a month, I just got my paper copy in the mail today.
Now that school is over, I’m excited to have a few moments to get back into playing around with Rails. It will be a welcome change of pace to be sure.
One thing I’m concerned about is the use of semi-colons in URLs to make them RESTful. It seems to me that is a step backwards in usability (for the website user). But, I’ll need to examine this closer to be sure.
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I found a pretty cool site for cataloging your books in a social fashion similar to flickr’s social tagging system for photos.
It’s called LibraryThing and it’s got all sorts of nifty features to make book enthusiasts go ape.
They also have blog widgets that can be posted on your non-lj blogs or other personal pages.
My profile can be found here: http://www.librarything.com/profile/djmook
I’m still in the process of cataloging my books and have got almost the first 300 entered in. At the moment almost all of these are my bible reference books.