• Title: Learning Rails
• Author: Simon St. Laurent, Edd Dumbill
• Paperback: 442 pages
• Publisher: O’Reilly Media, Inc.; 1 edition (November 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596518773
• ISBN-13: 978-0596518776

I have a couple ideas for data-driven Twitter tools, and I read part of one book on Ruby on Rails before, so since that book’s in storage I grabbed a copy of this one.

The book works from the outside in – it assumes you’re a web designer, so it starts with the web interface, introducing the database aspects later.  Which isn’t what I wanted of course – I want to understand how to use Rails to simplify and speed up database construction and management, along with giving me quick web front ends I can later customize.

Don’t get me wrong – the book works, but it seems backwards for a toolkit that has the intent of making it faster to build data-driven web applications.