I am not a fan of Dave Thomas. I prefer less chatty books with more detailed discussion. That being said, this is a great book to dive into Rails apps. and Dave's style is really very appropriate for the kind of fast, fun, satisfying experience that Rails development can offer. Man, the language has changed so much over such a short period of time that my version is practically useless now! Well, truth be known, after you have completed the example project the book is pretty useless anyway. In a way, it is like test driving a car but the dealer makes you pay for the ride. It really is just a walk-through of an example program and very little more. But the example introduces you to the main activities of Rails programming and after completion one feels pretty confident. Why four stars you ask? Cause it's funner than a jigsaw puzzle on a rainy Sunday! ( )

Dave thomas is a pretty good writer, I thought that [b:The Pragmatic Programmer|4099|The Pragmatic Programmer From Journeyman to Master|Andrew Hunt|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165384260s/4099.jpg|7809] was an excellent book. However, alot of the garbage suggested in AWD makes me doubt how much experience the author has writing scalable, agile, high traffic web-applications.If you go into this book looking to learn how to code with rails, thats fine, but don't expect to learn to program well for the web from this book. Infact, be prepared to ignore large portions of the book.Anyway I guess this review is pretty pointless, this book is about rails 1.X. I do not recommend either using rails 1.X or reading docs on it either. If you're not pretty close to the newest version of the framework you're missing great new features, better performance, better new plugin support, and probably better stability. Reading old docs would be like reading instructions on doing it wrong. ( )

A great introduction to Rails. I found the book well written and easy to follow, with only a few chapters getting too gritty to follow. The Depot app is great and I constantly referred back to the techniques used in it while making my first Rails app. This book is also a fantastic reference as it's well indexed and provides good clear descriptions to get started on many Rails features. I'll definitely be buying a copy for my own reference when the 3rd edition comes out. ( )

Very good introduction to development with Rails. Goes over the basics quite well, although doesn't go into a lot of depth. ( )

One of the first, and so far the best book on developing web applications on Rails using Ruby. ( )

A great introduction to ruby on rails. However a lot has changed since this book was written only a year ago, and there is about to be a second edition released December 2006. You can get "beta" releases of the new edition in pdf from the publishers website. ( )

The first (and one of the best so far) guide to Ruby on Rails. ( )

The first book to introduce how to build web application by rails ( )