book: $20 PDF, $49.99 PDF + print - both on sale at Manning now!
Flexible Rails is a book about how to use Adobe Flex 3 and Ruby on Rails 2 together to build Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
It is not an exhaustive Ruby on Rails tutorial (Agile Web Development with Rails does that already) or a Flex 3 reference manual (Adobe ships over 2000 pages of PDF reference documentation with Flex 3).
Instead, it is an extensive tutorial, developed iteratively, on building a fairly interesting RIA using Flex 3 and Rails 2 together.
The book is complete and is available from Manning in both PDF ($20) and combo (Print book + PDF, $49.99) formats. Please consider buying the PDF or the PDF + print book combo direct from Manning--having a PDF copy of the book is very helpful, since you can copy and paste the code direct from the book as you read, and you can also keep the book with you on your laptop and leave the print book at home.
Over a thousand readers have read Flexible Rails in "early access" form, both from the Manning Early Access Program and when I self-published it on Lulu. (Flexible Rails rose to #73 all-time on the Lulu sales rank before I "retired" it from Lulu and it became a Manning book.)
Reviews
Here is some of what people have already said about the book:
"I've had an early look at the book, and it's really well done. If you're doing any work on Flex and Ruby, I'd highly recommend getting a copy of it."
-- Mike Potter, Web / Open Source Evangelist, Developer Relations, Adobe
"For those of you who want a little more richness in your application interfaces, and AJAX just isn’t cutting it, Flexible Rails is exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Peter presents the material clearly, and does a great job of bringing the reader from zero to useful application skills quickly. This is a great introduction to a very interesting application of Rails."
--Steven Baker, original creator of RSpec, the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for Ruby
"Flexible Rails is an excellent “beta book” on the use of Adobe Flex with Ruby on Rails, but I think the beta book handle is a bit of a misnomer, particularly for this book. The book itself is the “tip of the iceberg” for a collection of resources managed by the author, Peter Armstrong, around the subject. In addition to the pdf formatted book, with (typically monthly) updates, book purchase gets you access to the following:
- A Google code group with several hundred of the book’s readers, closely monitored by the author.
- A pretty nice application, “pomodo”, which is the subject grist for the book’s mill.
- Complete Web 2.0 style bug tracking for the book and pomodo errata.
The book is divided into over 20 iterations, wherein pomodo is variously built, refactored, debugged, sliced, diced and otherwise explored from every conceivable angle with respect to Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex. The process of the book’s elaboration parallels the complete elaboration of pomodo itself, and sharpens the edge of the tutorial.
The Web 2.0 style participation in the evolution of the book and pomodo, provides huge value over and above the Flex and Rails tutorial itself. This participation is at least as enlightening, for those of us that would like to better understand and leverage the Web 2.0 participation-age tools and techniques, as it is in teaching the development of Rails and Flex applications. That is, if you don’t buy the book now, I think you miss out on a lot of valuable teaching that flows from the process.
I think the beta book designation is unfortunate and misleading. It needs a better name. The “book” presents a multi-dimensional, first-class, hands-on learning experience that is tough to quantify, but really easy to qualify: don’t miss it. "
--Lou Springer, Enterprise Architect at Sun Microsystems
To see more reviews, click here.
