Another book that O’Reilly Media was kind enough to send me was Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting. I like making stuff, and I’m confident enough in my manhood to admit to the internet that I learned to sew, crochet, and knit a bit as a kid even if I only remember a bit of it now. I can thread a needle and I know where a bobbin on a sewing machine is. So I figured this book would be pretty fun and useful. I love Make Magazine and Craft Magazine. This book is a pretty direct summary of techniques and projects from Craft that can get you started.
This review is going to be a bit short. This book has a lot of strong aspects. It covers techniques and materials well. I didn’t even know some of this stuff existed, and just reading about the materials and techniques alone really got me going and inspired to start making. Everything is very clearly written, and makes the entire process very non-daunting even if you’re pretty new to the DIY world. Even the explaintations of electronics were really practical and friendly. That’s hard to do. The printing is great, on high quality paper and the entire book conveys a feeling of ‘fun’ really well.
Normally a part of Make and Craft magazines that I like the most are the detailed tutorials stepping you through how to do various things in great detail. For example there’s a killer article on soldering SMT components and projects in the newest Make Magazine that’s worth buying this issue solely for that project alone. Yet, for some reason in this book the projects totally lose me. Page 76 onwards until the references in the back of the book just don’t do it for me. The technology primer section at the beginning was so dead on, and so great, but then this section fell a bit flat for me. It’s not that the projects are bad… so much as useless or at least to me. To be frank, this book is targetted at women, which I am not one of, so maybe that’s why I don’t get the projects. Reading the primer sections I was imagining all sorts of neat things to make and build from the things I was learning and then I just didn’t find them in the later sections of the book.
The LED braclet is pretty cool, and could be modified to something useful. The Rock Star Headphones are pretty well useless. The Space Invader Tote has a few neat things, but I can’t imagine any girl I know using it. The Birdie Brooch completely loses me (and this is coming from someone that wants a wearable computer like we all imagined in the 90’s so badly!) although it does step someone through etching a circuit board and using ICs a bit, which is a nice thing to show. The Photochromic Blinds are one of the best things in the book, and give a nice intro to screenprinting. The Cardboard table is neat, but not great. Then things just go down from there for me as it moves into the interactive toy section. I could see someone really enjoying them if they have kids, but not many other people… then again maybe that’s the target- a making mom!
Overall this is a good book, and well worth getting… if just for the technology primer section, and the screenprinting and PCB etching tutorials- then get a subscription to Craft Magazine and go from there. I don’t think they expected many people to actually go through and make all of this stuff, but rather take it as inspriration and/or modify it to suit their own needs. That’s great, but the projects themselves just left me feeling a bit lukewarm. My only other request is that they start releasing these books with a spine that you can easily open up and lay down (maybe spiral bound?) I find that when working on a project its hard to keep these books open. The retail price is $30, but it seems that Amazon has it for $20, or used copies for even less so its not a bad deal at all.
O’Reilly’s Learning Rails (2008) by Laurent and Dumbill is a great way for a non-programmer, but techie person to dive into rails. I took AP Computer Science AB in High School, which was in C/C++ but I haven’t done much programming since, except a bit of cut and paste PHP and some javascript hackery. Early in College I thought to teach myself web programming in Perl/CGI but the languages were just so complex that I couldn’t get my head around building anything really useful and they have become a bit depricated except for sysadmin purposes. I’ve worked around programmers for the past few years now and I’ve yearned to get back into programming. Yet, I keep trying to pick up what should be really awesome books and not being able to dig in. They make too many assumptions about your pre-existing knowledge or just don’t fit with my learning style. I’ve found that they make sense in a classroom situation or with a mentor to help guide me, but they just don’t fit me. I understand technology. I understand HTML, yet some concepts go a bit over my head.
For those completely non-programmers out there reading this Ruby on Rails is a framework (basically a lot of stuff done for you already) that makes developing web applications happen really quickly. Its sometimes taunted by developers in other camps as being unscalable due to the growing pains of its most prominent application, Twitter, but that really isn’t an issue. Rails is best suited towards rapid application development for testing and prototyping.
I took some photos for O’Reilly’s Ignite Boston 3 a few months ago and in return they’ve sent me a nice selection of O’Reilly books, including this one. I guess they sent it to me a bit ahead of publishing date, which was nice of them. I’ve found this book to be the perfect fit as an introduction to Rails. It isn’t condescending as a ‘For Dummies’ books might feel, but it doesn’t fly over your head or go into insane detail in trying to explain every intricacy of the framework. In fact, several times it tells you to not worry about something and that you can look into it later but not to sweat the small stuff.
This book doesn’t take the approach of many Rails tutorials that rush you through building a complex application in 5 minutes. Those make too many assumptions of knowledge and are made for showing off more than learning. This goes through in a simple logic manner to explain the layout of a Rails application and how to extend it. You won’t be a Rails master after reading this, but you’ll be ready for your next Rails book and you won’t be lost or confused.
The first chapters go through the basics of installing Rails (giving you multiple options) and explaining some problems you might hit and how to get around them. I already had Rails installed, but I’ve had problems before in reading other tutorials and wasn’t able to understand the layout of the application, how to start the programs, or what the hell these Gems were. This got me around that and I feel much more comfortable with such things.
It steps through basic MVC structure and handling of input, getting it into a database and dealing with RESTful interfaces. The mid section of the book elaborates on this more and gives you room to start actually building some interesting things. The book ends up talking about deploying basic Rails apps, Apache integration, SVN/git, Ajax and other useful topics.
The appendices are really useful and don’t just feel like tables from an encyclopedia. Appendix A takes you through a quick Ruby crashcourse which was really useful. It might still be a bit too high level for your mother to grasp quickly, but if you’ve ever done any sort of programming then you’ll get it almost instantly. The other appendices are equally useful and definitely aren’t just page filler.
So if you’re just trying to wrap your head around Rails I wholehearted recommend this book. I haven’t found a better introduction to Rails, but you likely won’t find a bunch of super-geeks recommending it as it was probably too low of a level for them to want to read. You’ll be able to dig through most of it in a long afternoon, and internalize most of it in a week or so. The examples are clear, short and easily understandable. There are no multipage sections of code to copy, which are often tough to understand and prone to typing errors. The next up rails book that I’d recommend for an aspiring programmer who doesn’t have a large history in programming would be Agile Programming in Rails.
