Posts Tagged book review
Book Review: The RSpec Book
Posted by claudiolassala in Software Development on June 16, 2011
I’ve just finished reading “The Rspec Book: Behaviour-Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber, and Friends”, and I totally recommend it to anybody writing Ruby code. Being fairly new to Ruby, I had limited experience (still do) to RSpec and Cucumber, but despite plenty of literature available on the web, I was glad to find a book dedicated to this subject so I could absorb some structured information.
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The RSpec Book: Behaviour Driven Development with Rspec, Cucumber, and Friends (The Facets of Ruby Series) |
I like the way the book is organized and how it develops the idea of “outside-in” development; starting from writing features in Cucumber, writing “the code you wish you had”, and then going into RSpec to drive out the implementation of controllers and models.
The authors do a great job at explaining how RSpec works, and that was very useful as that had been kind of magical for me. I start to see more and more what people have been raving about regarding how Ruby is such an elegant language. The book also includes tips on how one can clean up tests by using built-in matcher, or creating custom matchers, and stuff like that.
I’m keeping this book handy so I can use it as a reference as I write my tests and look for ways to improve clarity.
Book Review: Rails for .NET Developers
Posted by claudiolassala in Software Development on June 2, 2011
Only recently I’ve found out about this book:
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Rails for .NET Developers (Facets of Ruby) |
I’m not sure it’d have been more useful when I was just getting started on Rails, or now that I’ve had “some” experience with it (still long ways to go, though…). Regardless, this is a good read for .NET developers, no matter whether you’re looking into learning Rails, or whether you just want to see if there are ideas from Ruby or Rails that you’d like to incorporate into your .NET applications. Or, as mentioned in the book, it may also be useful for Rails developers who may need to teach .NET developers.
I’ve picked up this book mostly because I wanted to see what kinds of things I had not looked into it yet since I started messing with Rails. To my surprise, I’ve realized I have tried (or at least read about some place else…) most of the things covered by the book.
Throughout the book, the author shows .NET and Rails counterparts. At the time the book was written, the ASP.NET MVC wasn’t quite out yet, so the author covered mostly WebForms, and had just a small section on ASP.NET MVC. Not a lot of words had to be spent on the .NET samples, though; since the main target for this book is .NET developers, it’s assumed they’d have a good understanding of the .NET implementation.
With that said, it may not be a fair comparison, but my general perception is that the Rails implementations were much smaller and cleaner than their .NET counterparts.
I’m reading several other Rails/Ruby-related books, so you can expect some more reviews published here as I finish them off. You can also check out my list of resources I’m using to learn Rails.
Claudio Lassala's Blog 