Dave Thomas (1) (1956–)

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. show more 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! show less

A tour de force journey through the dynamic, object-oriented language known as Ruby, with over 200 pages of new material and full descriptions of all the standard library modules. Covers strings, classes, blocks, and regular expressions with thorough examples. This book has such a reputation as the definitive reference for learning Ruby that it is simply called "The Pickaxe Book" in the programming community. There are many Ruby tutorials and references on the web, but the beauty of this show more book is that it is both well-written and provides a compendium of what you really need to know about Ruby that can't be easily sourced and collected. This is the ultimate book for both learning Ruby and use as a desk reference. show less

After the positive experience with The Pragmatic Programmer (their first book), I kept an eye these guys. And when we started a new project at work that required us to move from a primitive source code control utility to a full-blown CVS installation, I decided to give their new book, Pragmatic Version Control with CVS, a try. This time, I bought the book direct from the publisher in the PDF+print form. That was really handy, like most geeks, I want to read about the new stuff NOW. I show more immediately printed out the PDF version and set about learning all I needed to know about CVS while waiting for the regular version to arrive. This book is at exactly the right level for the practitioner. It places the "gee I know nothing about source code control" in easy to skip sections and explains all the required setup and configuration stuff, not in exhaustive detail, but at a level that lets you get started and function without being overwhelmed with the minutia. If you use CVS but don't really understand it, or think you may need something like CVS, get this book. If you don't really "get" source code control and version management, this is still a great book, those first sections really explain the details and complexity that a tool like CVS manages for you. They also have released a version for Subversion, the open-source world's new darling source code management tool. Functionally, it's very similar but has a lot of new features. show less

A good book to have read at some point for historical reasons - DHH's involvement kind of makes that an imperative. However, it's dated (actually pre 1.0) so many of the specifics are no longer correct or recommended, and it misses big chunks of what is now conventional rails (RESTful routes for example). A better source for current practice (at least until 3.0) is The Rails Way by Obie Fernandez