Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice) Review

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Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice) ReviewRight at the start of Pro Active Record the authors address a possible problem some may have with it: that there's not enough in Active Record to warrant a full book. They point out that the basics are well covered as sections elsewhere but that this is the first book to really dig into working with legacy schema and other `advanced' uses. That's fair enough, but after reading the book I am still left with the question of why, then, they dedicate the first half to covering ActiveRecord's most basic concepts?
Judging from postings on the rails email list, there's certainly a lot of confusion about ActiveRecord, associations, observers, how to work with legacy table names and primary keys, and so on. But in a book with a title prefix of "Pro" I was expecting to jump straight into the nitty gritty of topics like compound/composite primary keys and performance tuning, probably with some real world examples, and maybe with a serious exploration of AR's internals. As it is, such topics only get a quick treatment in the final chapter (the compound/composite primary keys section is a paragraph referring users to a plugin).
It's almost always instructive reading other developers' code and it would be unfair to claim that I didn't spot a couple of tips that may prove useful, but they were passing things. And sometimes I found myself wondering what happened to the tech review process, particularly in the coverage of the has_one association, where not only is the variable naming confusing, but they seem to be calling the each method on a single ActiveRecord instance.
I'm left wondering what the audience is for this book. The title and blurbs suggest it's pitched at people who want to go deeper into ActiveRecord than they have before, but the content is better suited for someone with some database experience who wants to pick up ActiveRecord to write some scripts. As it is, if you've worked with ActiveRecord before your time will be better spent writing plugins and exploring the internals for yourself, and if you've not you'll get most of the same material from a decent Rails book and some time exploring.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby and Rails (Expert's Voice) OverviewDespite it's less than catchy name, ActiveRecord is a key part of the "magic" that makes Ruby on Rails such a hit. Without ActiveRecord, there would be no Rails. ActiveRecord is the connection between a Rails application and its data. Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers who want to exploit all the features of Ruby, of Rails, of their chosen database must learn ActiveRecord.Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby picks up with ActiveRecord where most books on Ruby and the Rails framework leave off. Readers begin by learning about all the built-in assumptions that make it so wondrously easy to create freshly-built Rails applications from scratch. Next, readers learn how to adapt ActiveRecord to work with databases - and this includes just about all preexisting databases - that were designed without those assumptions in mind. Readers go on to learn how to tie ActiveRecord in with database-specific features such as stored procedures and large objects, how to migrate legacy database designs to work better with ActiveRecord, and how to extend ActiveRecord to provide new and innovative database functionality to their applications. Readers who absorb the knowledge given in this book will have a significant competitive advantage over those with only a superficial knowledge of the topic.

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