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by sergiotapia·13y ago·view on hn ↗
I disagree.

It's good to read bits and pieces here and there, but he deviates too much into Git, Github, Heroku, Unit Testing, etc.

I want to learn Rails and Ruby. An already hard enough task.

There's no reason to smash my face into so many new concepts at once.

-Source: Myself when I starting out with Rails.

A much better source I found is the book Agile Web Development with Rails from Pragmatic Programmer Bookshelf:

http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...

Starts with dumb, .html.erb files, for static HTML, then slowly builds up on previous lessons - WITHOUT GOING TOO MUCH OFF TANGENT.

Unit tests, rspec! the second coming! yada yada. I wanted to learn Rails, most newbie want that as well.

3 comments
Hey sergiotapia, thanks for sharing your thoughts! What did you think about the top review on Amazon to this book? http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Development-Rails-Pragmatic-Prog...

One must work hard to grasp what is being taught. It requires a lot of motivation, reviewing and double checking. Too much is given at once, in the wrong order and with little explanation (if any). Too much is left open. Proper subject matter review for a consistent explanation isn't available.There is a summary at the end of each chapter, but it is as a statement of goals "achieved" and not an explanation. I could list many examples. One can easily get lost following (or trying to follow...) the book. It can be a real pain.

As a rails newbie I found the integration of all the tools I use, git with remotely tracked branches, unit testing, deploying to a production server, etc to be a refreshing reprieve from sites that give you the basics of one thing and one thing only and no clue how to put them together with the other aspects of my job. The ramp up on Hartl rails tutorial was perfectly paced in my opinion.
The Hartl tutorial does start with static pages (in fact I believe that's actually the name of Chapter 3), but fair play - I hear good things about the Prag Prog book too.