This book is great for beginners starting out on Rails programming. It shows you how to develop using TDD, use version control with Git and pushing the code out to Heroku. It doesn’t go into detail in any of those, but gives you enough to use it on simple applications.

I already had experience with Rails 2 so I was expecting to plod along in this book to find all the new features. Instead, it took me on a tour of using RSpec, Git, Spork, Factory Girl, the Ruby language. I knew some of them and it was great to discover new gems as they were being used. This way you get to see how useful a gem like Spork or Factory Girl can be. The book is well rounded and any beginner who picks up this book would get a good foundation in Rails.

It’s hard not to put this book down and start coding. You want to try it out and see for yourself. I think this is the reason why it took me longer to read this book than I expected. After I was done, I scanned through the book from the beginning, and I was able to pick up things I had glossed over. I’m tempted to re-read this book.