Review: Agile Web Development With Rails, Second Edition

Agile Web Development With Rails is a book about programming Rails, which is a web framework written in Ruby, which is the language that octopuses would write freaking sweet video games in all the time if they weren't so busy eating sharks. Ruby on Rails came from the Basecamp project written by David Heinemeier Hansson, who is very loud and kind of annoying but it's okay because he wrote Rails.

Ruby As A Language

If you've ever written anything in Ruby then you already know that it's impossible to stop programming after you start. Soon you're inventing dumb, complex projects just because Ruby translates thoughts to programming so incredibly well that you can't help yourself. I have written strange, unspeakable magicks in Ruby that I'm pretty sure you have to be a twentieth-level wizard to cast. I can cast them because I cheat on my rolls.

The Book Itself

When I got in my car to come home from work tonight, suddenly this gigantic moth started buzzing around inside my windshield. At least, I think it was a moth. From the size of it, it might have been a small dragon. 

Immediately, I screamed like a girl and rolled down all my windows and tried to get it to get out of my car by begging and swerving my car around. I'm pretty sure everyone who saw me leaving the parking lot just thought I was a badass driver because I'm all asian and I drive a Nissan, but really I was just trying to keep the moth from flying in my ears and laying its eggs in me. It's really hard to drive when you have your hands over your ears, but I managed to make it to a parking lot a few buildings down. Then, I looked for a book to smash it with.

Learning Perl 5 (Revised Edition) could have wasted the moth, but it's seriously like six inches thick and my arms are too girly to pick it up. Ajax on Rails is a smaller book and I could have gotten it down into the corner where my windshield and dashboard meet, but I didn't have it in the car, because seriously, who tries to do something in Ajax and pulls out a book? People just go to the website for prototype.js and read that stuff there. I don't even know why I own that book.

Luckily, David Heinemeier Hansson's fantastic book was there. I didn't want to sit in my car in the parking lot while everybody drove past me, so I just kept swerving down the road and launching the Rails book at my windshield trying to get the moth. For a while, I kept missing and I thought it was going to fly in my ears while I was holding the book, but eventually I got a lucky splat and killed it and gained a billion experience. The cover is so shiny that the moth just fell off onto the passenger seat, so I left it there to scare girls away. I was so excited that I forgot about driving over to Fancy's to inject blendered girl scouts into my femoral artery, like I was going to do, and instead just thought about Rails all the way home.

The Pretty Cover

AWDwR(SE) has a very pretty cover, with a skateboarder doing a totally awesome rail slide in blurry motion. The skateboarder represents Web 2.0. In the bottom left corner is a really neat little icon that says "Rails" underneath a picture of an octopus's engorged tentacle. This represents the octopus-like versatility of Rails.

In the bottom right hand corner, there are the names of the people who wrote the book, which includes the guy who invented Wendy's and David Heinemeier Hansson, who has a very long middle name.

The Words Inside

I mostly have this book for reference, because I already know how to write things in Rails. However, having had the last edition of this book (which is called AWDwR(FE)), I was surprised that Rails now has RJS, which is a way to code Javascript without looking as stupid as you would by actually writing things in Javascript. I find this has tremendous value even if I never ever code anything in RJS, because it gives me more reasons to tell people why Rails is important and good.

At work, we use a framework called creovel, which is kind of like Rails' retarded younger brother who owns a Vincent Black Shadow and always beats him in races. (Rails drives a Vespa.) Creovel is a very good framework for not having to wait for another Ice Age for your page to come up, which is what happens if you use Rails. Also, I had to say something good about creovel because all my bosses wrote it and they could potentially form some kind of Boss Voltron and beat me up.

Final Score

David Heinemeier Hansson   8.6/10

Ruby 11/10

Octopus Logo 14/3.14159265358979323846 (yes i know this by heart i win)

Creovel f(n)

Moth Killing Powers 46/52

Total Score: Eleventy Billion