"Rebuilding Rails looks like a brilliant product. Makes me wish I'd thought of it."
- Giles Bowkett (@gilesgoatboy)
on Twitter
"If you've ever wanted to understand the internals of Rails better, this is a good place to start because basically you go through and rewrite your own version of Rails — and you know, it is a simplified version of Rails — but you will learn basically how it works and how the router works and how controllers work together with view and stuff like that and you learn it by rewriting it yourself. So I recommend that."
-
Avdi Grimm recommending Rebuilding Rails on the Ruby Rogues
"This well-crafted eBook is a step-by-step guide in building Ruby on Rails from scratch. It's like learning how cars work by building one. Noah has paid particular attention to detail and skillfully guides you through building-up the framework, piece-by-piece."
- John Ryan in a
posted review
"I thought it was great! Knowing how your tools work under the hood is the best way to understand and master them, and that's exactly what Rebuilding Rails does. I really liked how you focused on one piece at a time while providing exercises and context from Rails. Great stuff."
- Jesse Storimer, Author of
Working with Unix Processes
I just watched (and typed by hand) the Rebuilding Rails video chapters 1-6. What and awesome series! I’ve been a Ruby/Rails developer for 5+ years now, but I never bothered to understand how Rails works. I bought the book in October of 2019 and took a quick look at it, but never really read it in depth. After watching your video series, I want to know more about the internals of how Rails works. I’ll be reading the book, in depth, while typing out each example, starting this evening. Thanks for taking your time, which I know is valuable, since you have a family, to help us learn how Rails is built. Have a great day.
- Shawn Kearney
"I bought the Rebuilding Rails book when I was a lot less experienced.. I’ve attempted to go through the book twice and each time I got more out of it. Intend on doing that again at some point soon. I came into the industry through the bootcamp route but I couldn’t bear the superficiality of what I was learning and working on so recently I’ve been working through a bachelors CS curriculum and intend on starting a masters at some point next year depending on my preparedness.
Just from following along and invariably having bugs.. you learn stuff, no matter how inexperienced. It’s definitely one to be reread several times.. looking forward to the next read! Will probably be sooner rather than later since this group now exists 😀"
- Jay M, in the Software Technique Slack workspace
Rebuilding Rails was a big turning point for me in terms of -truly- understanding the framework and it's continued to pay dividends this whole time.
- Thomas van der Pol
"What drew my attention to your book was that well.. I'm the type of developer that likes to know how things tick at a very deep level. The guy who messed with Assembler but knew he din't have to. I'm not a huge fan of magic when it comes to programming for the fact that when you get into trouble with code or find yourself in a complex edge case, or even a bug, knowing more about what's going on "behind the scenes" is very helpful."
- Kirk Quesnelle
"Okay, damn you, you win! I'll buy the book: the exercises are just too good. Particularly as someone with no formal CS education whose exposure to Rails has been primarily in the workplace it seems to me that you've struck a fine balance between explication and challenge, and your preference for extracting and examining information usually left implicit is perfect for me.
What's the cliche? You write as though your audience has minimal knowledge and limitless intelligence. I realize that in purchasing your book I am compensating you for the time you've spent living through and articulating these lessons rather than investing in some future endeavor, but I hope you won't stop here."
- Eli, Test Engineer
This book helped me a lot to understand Rails internals and to start contributing to Rails. I highly recommend it.
—
@dixpac on Twitter
If you've been writing Rails for a bit and are ready to start taking a peak at how its magic works, this book will give you confidence to crack open the source and debug even the trickiest of Rails metaprogramming.
—
Josh Greenwood on Twitter
"Rebuilding Rails covers a similar challenge of building your own simpler framework on Rack to understand the internals of Rails. I went ahead and bought the book after going through the free first two chapters.
Understand Rails by Building a Ruby Web Framework
Gulp! Here’s to less magic!"
—
Musannif Zahir, zmuses.com
I have been coding for more than 8 years. My secret sauce for getting good is trying to tackle some difficult problem every morning for 30 to 60 minutes 😃
I think that "Rebuilding Rails" is one of the most important books I have ever read. Most of junior/mid level engineers get stuck on some problem that they could easily overcome if they would treat their Rails and other gems codebases as their own and look at stack trace more carefully, play around with the code and understand how everything works on higher level.
One thing that could be improved about this book is its cover and update the content to newer version of Rails. Updating the book is only important for junior/mid devs. I think that for more advanced developers this doesn't really matter that much.
- Toni Dezman
"I saw your talk at Gogaruco. It was fun!
Your methodology maps onto how I like to learn things: from the ground up from first principles."
- Yehuda Katz, author of Merb and Ember.js and former Ruby on Rails core team member
"I'm from the group that bought Rebuilding Rails because I wanted to understand how it ticked and rely less on the "magical" side of the framework and also because I had the great fortune of being put into a team that is composed almost 100% of senior devs, so I didn't want to lag behind and I thought that being on par with my colleagues was a great goal for me to set in the long run."
- Mateus Pereira
"I’m looking forward to diving into Rebuilding Rails this spring as a way to develop some specific knowledge that’ll help me continue developing and learning (and satisfy my curiosity about how things work). 😀"
- Amy Henning
"I work daily with Rails and loved this book, it has really helped me over the years. So glad it exists!"
- Jeb Coleman
"Rebuilding Rails is a book I’ve certainly enjoyed for myself, and increasingly I also find myself recommending it to people who want to learn more about Ruby web services in general. "
- Mazin Power El Fehaid
"Rebuilding Rails was precisely what I was looking for when I decided to get a deeper understanding of the framework. I love to know what makes things tick, and that helped a lot.
With books like RR I often give it an initial dry-run with some light notes, put it down a few weeks, then come back to it fresh.
I find it helps me with a holistic, working knowledge vs. trying to cram it all in at once and drowning."
- Tyler Williams
"Looking forward to rooting around in the rails internals (or well, recreating a simplified version). I know you've had your ups and downs with this idea but I just wanted to put my money where my mouth is and tell you it's probably my favourite idea to come out of the
3x5 wave I rode in on. Partially because it's aimed at me but mostly because it perfectly lines up with the way I learn best."
For my money it helped more than Metaprogramming Ruby (though that is also a cool book) because the format of building a substantial project over the course of one book works much better for me.
- Thomas van der Pol
"I found your book there a while back and finally over Christmas I've had that I had and I'm learning and clarifying a lot of things. In fact, I'm like a kid in a candy store. It's so nice to be spoon fed this info as it's a lot of work to dig it out all by oneself.
It was the perfect Christmas present to myself ;-)
Your flow and pedagogic style is just excellent, always dropping in some neat tricks along side the main topic. Good job. The sparsity of the book makes it a good example of content is king..."
"I've purchased the Rebuilding Rails book a while back while I was learning Rails, and it really helped me get a better grasp of how things work, and clarify some of the magic."
- Silviu Straliciuc
"I’m about 40% into RR but bought it long ago. I have learned a few tricks and it’s been helpful so far. I intend to finish it now that I’m jobless and looking for a new Rails remote job."
- Emmanuel Hayford
"Bought Rebuilding Rails to understand how a MVC framework is built and the underlying implementation. "
- Daniel Lee
"(I) met some of your great developers coincidentally. Told them about Rebuilding Rails. Please share this with your team."
- Robert Jewell
on Twitter