Sinatra: Up and Running: Ruby for the Web, Simply

It's a true rush to build a single file Sinatra web server that does most of what you need for a simple web application. It's double the rush if you've spent time doing Rails development- almost like putting on shorts and a t-shirt after a long winter.And this book makes is a quick, painless, and worthwhile journey.It is a fantastic book and you need to get it if you use Ruby for anything, but especially if you use if for Rails. You'll have fun, it'll take less than a day, and you'll be a better Sinatra, Ruby, Rails, or whatever developer.I avoided Sinatra because I had already learned Rails and figured "why bother?". However, in deciding to migrate an old Rails application I decided to look at JSON and the new MVC JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS. I had read that Sinatra was often used for web services, and decided to quickly throw up an instance and wire up JSON interfaces as I worked my way back from an AngularJS prototype to my old Rails app. That way I could learn and design with freedom while keeping an eye on where I needed to go. Then, based on the prototype results, I'd create a new Rails 4 project and merge the old and new together.Now I'm not sure if I need Rails 4- Sinatra is elegant, beautiful and powerful and this book got me up and running at full productivity in less than a day. I'm rethinking Rails design philosophy in the greater freedom Sinatra offers, which, even if I go back to Rails, will only make me a better Rails developer.This book has no fluff and one one of the things I loved about is that most core concepts are shown via HTTP requests via cURL and the concept of RESTFUL web development is made extremely clear.Better yet, the second half of the book walks the reader through Sinatra internals showing the way using irb (Ruby's interactive shell) and object introspection. What was magic becomes clear, and gives readers the confidence to use Sinatra to it's maximum.A final note on Sintra- Sinatra interacts with the Rails ecosystem via the common ground of Ruby, Ruby Gems and Rack, the web-server middleware used by Rails. You can use ActiveRecord, HAML, SASS, Bundler, and create apps that are very similar to Rails in design.

Well paced, useful explanations, concise examples. The content overall gets you if you already know some Ruby, personally I had also read some Rails so I wanted to deep into other Ruby related tools. Worth the price!

This book is really basic, seriously I could have just used the intro on the sinatra web site and been in the same shape. I was hoping the later chapters would have a deep dive into tuning and advanced topics but it pretty much just gets you up and running.

I read this book through in its entirety in just a few days. It was short but thorough, and I thought it covered all the necessities rather well. Even if you don't use either Ruby or Sinatra, I'd recommend picking this up to find out just how simple building web applications should be.

Like most O'Reilly books, this one starts off easy with a basic introduction to the technology and then ramps up quickly to let you let your hands dirty.Familiarity with Ruby and Rack is a bonus, and will help the material digest a bit easier.

book

Great book for a great DSL.Funny when it can be.Good coverage about Sinatra concepts.A book to start thinking how web applications can be effective, robust and simple at the same time.Good job!

Typos, editing mistakes and spotty cover make this a must miss for anyone wanting to learn about the Sinatra framework. You'd get further just printing the source code and eating it to ingest the information that you need.

Sinatra is a simple and powerful web server framework, and this book is worth reading if you're interested in Sinatra. However, this book is not as comprehensive as the O'Reilly book on Rails, nor is it as polished as other O'Reilly books.Specific criticisms:- There are some silly mistakes in the text, which better proof-reading and editing would have corrected. I think this probably extends to mistakes in example code.- Some useful features of Sinatra aren't really explained - for example layouts are mentioned but not fully explained.- The book gives a glimpse of how Sinatra works, but it doesn't fully explain Rack or the Ruby magic that Sinatra uses. I found myself wanting a more comprehensive explanation. Alternatively, I would preferred a full description of how to use Sinatra with less of how it works. Instead the book leaves me thinking "it's rather complicated, I don't think I really understand it".- It would be useful to cover other Ruby tools that work well with Sinatra.

It's all in here, you just need to find it. A good reference after going through a gentler introduction. I suspect this would be the well thumbed reference book on my shelf, if it wasn't for me having the kindle version.

I recognize there's not much to talk about Sinatra to fill a massive book but I felt it was lacking in certain areas

I guess it lived up to it's name, in that it gets you up and running with Sinatra and then does go deeper into the underlying pieces of Sinatra, but it is woefully incomplete in addressing a variety of practical use cases and different scenarios for deployment. There wasn't much in here that's not in the free tutorials and online documentation.

This book is a great tool for learning how web applications work, because it forces you to look at the code which parses HTTP messages, routes them to the message handlers, (possibly) interacts with the database and renders the views. Of course, once you are familiar with database interaction, you can bring in your favourite ORM to do the grunt-work for you. Ditto for parsing libraries, templating libraries, etc.I wouldn't write a really big application with Sinatra, but you can go a long way with just Sinatra.