"Build Your Own Rails Web Applications" goes to print January 23rd

The Rails book I’ve been writing for the folks over at SitePoint finally went to print about a week ago. It’s been quite a bumpy ride to tailor a book’s content around a not-yet-published-and-ever-so-changing release of an application that is developed in such a rapid fashion as Rails.

And I’m saying that even though the release of Rails 1.2 took its creator and maintainers longer than they had anticipated. When you’re craving letters in stone paper, you better aim for something close to perfection since it’s likely not going to be updated in quite some time. (That’s indeed the point at which you wish for Wiki-like features in books.)

In the end, I think we did fairly well. Mainly because of hard working and brilliant folks like Matthew Magain, who served as the technical editor for my book. My sincere gratitude to you, Matt.

For completeness’ sake, here’s the book’s summary from the back side of it:

Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications is a practical, step-by-step guide to building next-generation web applications using Ruby On Rails for beginners. While learning the intricacies of both Ruby and Rails, you’ll build a complete Web 2.0 social news application from scratch.

• Learn object oriented Ruby language fundamentals
• Use the new features available in Rails 1.2
• Reap the benefits of a best practice MVC architecture
• Build and deploy a complete Rails web application
• Use Rails’s Ajax features to create slick interfaces
• Work with databases easily using ActiveRecord
• Automatically test your code
• Use plugins to easily enhance your applications
• And a whole lot more…

The end result are some 400 pages of guiding you through the aforementioned highlights of Rails, with a focus on well-written, well-tested code. The target audience is beginner programmers with knowledge about HTML and CSS. As mentioned in the overview paragraph, I even cover object-oriented basics, so don’t be worried if you don’t have a good grasp of those yet.

“Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” should be available in stores in early February.

If you’re considering buying it, I hope you find it useful and maybe even somewhat entertaining. Whatever you think of it, I’d be more than happy to take your feedback!