Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce

Apress has just come out with two interesting releases in the Ruby and Rails spectrum. Beginning Ruby on Rails is a truly beginner-level book so if you felt other books were a bit overwhelming, it might be an excellent tome to start with. If you take the word of Hampton for it, the book should be a really excellent intro.

Another interesting new title is Practical Ruby for System Administration. One of the most obvious use cases for Ruby is as an “enterprise glue”, and that’s exactly what André Ben Hamou will teach you in his book.

(via Ruby Inside)

We briefly mentioned ruby-prof in the performance optimization chapter of the book. At the time there were some compatibility issues between ActionProfiler and ruby-prof, however. Now Charlie Savage has come out with an all-new version of his profiler, ruby-prof 0.5.0. According to Peter Cooper, the new version “is a major leap forward”, which seems to indeed be true.

We’ve got some nice reviews even outside the standard Amazon.com page. Rails superhero Jamis Buck wrote a very positive detailed review, as did Hendy Irawan. Even Java cowboys seem to love the book :-)

We spent a good part of the holidays working through all the great errata requests we have received, and the list is finally ready for publishing.

Thanks to everybody who have taken the time to point out corrections, we really appreciate it. Keep’em coming!

Pat Eyler over at On Ruby just published an interview with Christian. If you want to get a closer look at Christian’s thoughts about Rails, Ruby, Python, Java and all things related, go have a look. I was the “victim” of a similar interview in November.

On Ruby also sports a blogging contest for all who are interested in learning and teaching Ruby and Rails by writing. I had the honour to come up with the theme for the January 2007 edition and am also sitting in the the grand jury picking up the winners this month. I wrote a longer article about this month’s theme in my weblog.

The discussion about the book seems to be very lively on the Rails mailing list. Unfortunately the amount of traffic on the list is huge so it’s really hard to spot the posts related to the book from there. Therefore, I created a new list just for discussion about our book.

The list can be found at groups.google.com/group/railsecommerce and works exactly as the Rails lists do. So go ahead and post your enquiries and questions there.

We’re going to write articles on this site about topics that are related to Rails and e-commerce but that didn’t make the cut for the actual book. What would you like to read tutorials about? We’ve already been suggested writing about discount packages (real discounts, not the standard amazon packages where you pay as much as the two would cost separately) and hooking the JS auto-completion with AJAX. Anything else? The floor is yours.

Write your proposals in the comment form or – if you’re shy – directly to me (jarkko@jlaine.net).

Dear Rails Enthusiast,

We just got email from our editor Keir where he said he’d got his hands on our new book, Beginning Rails E-Commerce. His mail didn’t include the words “f*cking awesome”, but instead “superb” and “a work of art”, which we think are almost as good.

This means that the book will hit the shelves before you can say “Heinemeier”, so be sure to get yours while it’s still hot.

We wanted to make our book such that you can “read” it while you’re sitting in front of your computer. It’s completely project-driven, meaning the content is divided by task, and that you can build the sample application in small iterations, learning the background details on the fly.

As one of the core philosophies of Rails is to support best practices, we decided to do that as well. Most of the tasks are written test-driven, giving you a glimpse of the ease with which TDD can be used in Rails and the power it brings compared to a traditional, ad-hoc web application development process.

We hope you enjoy the book as much as we enjoyed the journey of writing it.

• Directly from Apress
• or from Amazon.com

Best,

Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine

On this page you can find the sample code for the book.

By Chapter:

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13

All chapters at once (4.8MB)

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