Rails for PHP Developers by Derek DeVries and Mike Naberezny is a manual designed to teach PHP programmers how to use Ruby on Rails, a web application development platform. For those who haven't heard of Rails, Rails is famous as a rapid development tool for creating web applications. Basecamp, Backpack, 43things, and Twitter are examples of web apps developed with Rails. (And whether Twitter should have been developed with Rails is a discussion for another day.)
Rails for PHP Developers is a mostly a tutorial book, though it does have three very useful reference chapters. After the preface, the book starts with a brief introduction explaining what Ruby and Rails are, and more importantly, a description of the MVC programming paradigm that is at the heart of Rails. MVC (Model-Views-Controller) is not a new paradigm by any means, but there are many programmers who have not been introduced to it. The book then moves on to two chapters describing Ruby, an Object Oriented Programming scripting language. By the time you reach Chapter 4, you are more than ready to begin jumping into Rails, and that's exactly what DeVries and Naberezny do.
The book follows the standard practice of having exercises and chapter reviews at the end of every chapter. There is nothing exceptional there. What I did find exceptional were the three reference chapters, which list correlations between PHP commands and Ruby commands and syntax. The tutorial leads a PHP developer through an entire project written in rails. By the end of Rails for PHP Developers, the reader will have all of the skills necessary to develop a Rails application.
Thankfully enough, unlike most Rails manuals, Rails for PHP Developers is not a "Rah, Rah, Rah for Rails" manual. It never once treats PHP as a lesser development platform. It demonstrates what Rails is good for, and it does it in a neutral way. It quickly brings any PHP programmer up to speed with one of the hottest technologies in existence today. I'd recommend this manual to any PHP developer who would like to quickly learn how to use Rails.
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