beachdog's Journal: Review of "Practical Rails Social Networking Sites"

Mini review: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites by Alan Bradburne, published by Apress, Berkeley, California 2007. US $44.99

Reviewed by Lee McK

Practical Rails Social Networking Sites has a cover subtitle "Learn how to implement a modern social networking web site using Rails, from design to deployment."

This book walks the reader through the steps of setting up Ruby and Rails software on a Linux or Windows (or BSD or Apple) computer and then designing and setting up several of the well known modules that appear in social networking websites like myspace.com and pbwiki.com.

The skill level expected by this book is you have worked through several chapters of an introductory Rails programming book. The back cover names two Apress Books as an introduction: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional. Also from Apress, Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional.

A book I used that prepared me for Practical Rails is Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. I probably invested 4 weeks or 50 hours doing the tutorials and then building two prototype web sites. (How much time I admit to spending depends on whether my wife is listening.)

I think this book is a really good tool if you have explored Rails and your aim is to develop a database backed website with users, blogs, email, user created pages, user uploaded photos, and use of published API services such as Google Earth.

My experience so far with Rails kind of came to a stop when I built a prototype website using a Gem called Goldberg (I think that is the name). This gem made it easy to create the frames and pages I wanted. So I jumped immediately to the core of my problem which required components for uploading global positioning system data and displaying the data on topographic maps. I got bogged down with geographical information systems problems and used up my development time. I shelved the project. Practical Rails: Social Networking Sites may be the casebook of examples that will help me restart this project.

Now this is where Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional. comes in as a guide. The author Alan Bradburne has divided the social networking website problem into about 10 components. For each component he walks through the classic Rails module development steps: you specify the requirements, sometimes you download a gem, then you create the model, the controller, the view and the tests.

This book is partly recipes. The website described in the book appears at http://railscoders.net

This book is in larger part an experienced developer showing the beautiful and powerful Rails "model view controller test" program design discipline.

For instance, one component is building a photo gallery. The author shows the classic Rails development steps as you modify the data model, you add processing in a controller and add display layouts in views and finally you write tests so you can promptly find out if later changes break earlier code.

07/25/07