When I was getting deeper into reading The Rspec Book a few weeks ago, I found that I had difficulties when it came to information that wasn’t included in the rails guides. I picked up The Rails 4 Way to rectify that. The book felt more like documentation while I was reading it and that’s very intentional. The breadth and depth was impressive and I wanted to get a book that I could carry with me as a physical documentation of the framework. I knew before reading it that I couldn’t memorize everything the book had to offer so I read it like I would when I read Google Map directions, finding the general routes I needed and making a mental note for things that I didn’t need to know now but would definitely look into once I reached that landmark.

The first chapter dealt with a rails environment and configuration. Most of it dealt with things I learned from other sources but I was introduced into the specifics of bundler and other configuration details. This is the section I learned to add gems into the vendor directory which I wanted to do because I recently learned about ctags from Upcase’s vim trail. This enabled me to jump around my app figuring out how methods are called throughout the application. The next three chapters after that were also refreshers on routes, REST in Rails, and controllers.

There were five full chapters that dealt with active record split into general active record uses, migrations, associations, validations and advance active record uses. Active record deals with so many parts of Rails that I remember looking at the source code before and not getting where to begin. The book delved into the database adapters for the most common relational databases and how Rails interprets the types of data they use. During the rest of the chapters, what stood out to me the most where how callback were used in the model, how associations are made particularly polymorphic associations, and using indexes.

The tenth chapter dealt with the action view part of Rails and introduced the decent exposure gem. Most of it was a refresher dealing with methods available in the view diretory, using partials, and rendering objects or collections. The most useful part I learned was the assigns instance variable which shows what is being communicated between the controller and view.