Our ActiveRecord book ...and YOU!

Posted by Chad Pytel

Feb 24

Well, it has started to show up on the Apress website, so I believe that means there is no use in hiding it any longer. Jon and I (along with our co-author, Kevin Marshall) are currently hard at work on book for Apress, entitled Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby: Databases with Ruby and Rails.

The book will focus solely on ActiveRecord, both inside and outside of Rails, and seeks to be a complete reference for ActiveRecord.

Well, with that out of the way, I’m currently working on the “Common Questions and Howtos” chapter, which is the chapter that contains all of the juicy tidbits and edge cases that don’t fit well into their own chapters, and if anyone out there has any ideas of things they’d like to see covered there, I’d be really interested to hear them. I’ve currently got some info on using multiple databases, how to handle localization, using composite primary keys, using GUID/UUID keys, and some other things along those lines – I’d love to hear if there is anything you think might be of value for both new users, experts and everyone in between.

Comments on this post

Chris Carter

Feb 24

Chris Carter said,

It would be cool if you could have some information about the has_many_polymorphs plugin

Chad Humphries

Feb 25

Chad Humphries said,

The more you can publicize various ways of utilizing foreign keys in ActiveRecord the better.

Chris

Feb 25

Chris said,

Definitely can’t wait! Does Apress having something like the Beta Books that Pragmatic Programmers has? If so, will definitely watch the development of this one.

James

Feb 25

James said,

Would love to see something on Class Table Inheritance. I know a number of people are trying to solve this one:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/6566

http://johnwilger.com/articles/2005/09/29/class-table-inheritance-in-rails-with-postgresql

http://rubyforge.org/projects/clti/

Dan Croak

Feb 27

Dan Croak said,

Very cool. Apress made a great choice bringing you and Jon on board. Your currently listed biographies on their site are fascinating, too. “A biography is not available for this author.”

A classic rags-to-riches story.

The question I’ve had for while about Ruby and databases that I’d love to see addressed is an explanation of “object databases” or “object-oriented databases.” I’ve only ever used relational databases and I don’t know why object databases are never discussed. Why are they not a good choice for a typical web app? What is the story behind how relational databases won mindshare over object databases? If impedance mismatch has been such a big problem that Rails’ and ActiveRecord’s elegant solution to object-relational mapping has drawn developers from all over the software world, why haven’t programmers in particular turned to the direct storage of objects? Is a Ruby Object Database a potential next step in the Rails world? Wouldn’t it make data retrieval faster? More importantly, wouldn’t it just be nice to have a full Ruby stack from databases to Rails to Mongrel?

Longest comment ever.

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