Review of "Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications" by Patrick Lenz

Book Review of O'Reilly Book, "Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications" by Patrick Lenz,
Reviewed by David Brown, Linux developer and enthusiast 7/14/2008.

This book provides an introduction to Ruby and Rails using a hands-on approach by walking though a single in-depth example application.

Some areas well covered:

1. Setup/installation instructions for Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on all 3 major platforms (Linux/Windows/Mac).

2. Introduction to the Ruby language.

3. Introduction to Rails 1.2.

4. Introduction to the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture.

5. Introduction to designing databases compatible with Ruby on Rails.

6. Introduction to AJAX (Asynchronous Java & XML).

7. Testing and implementing Ruby on Rails applications.

Some areas lacking:

1. Database searching and querying with customized forms.

2. Some of the example code no longer works with the latest Ruby on Rails. While some corrections are online, they only address versions prior to 2.0.