Help me pick a book

Hi there,

This is slightly OT. I've been using Ruby on Rails and quite like it (naturally). Also, I'm using Ruby more and more for my daily work and scripting.

Now,I find on O'Reilly that they have an offer that equates roughly into "Buy 2 Get 1 Free". I already have a few of the RoR books (the usual suspects) and I have no doubts about the next 2 books to buy - (1) Rails Cookbook and (2) Ruby Cookbook. Both look quite good at what they offer.

The problem is the 3rd book. I'm wondering which of the following I should buy: (1) In keeping with the 'Cookbook' theme, I could get the "CSS Cookbook" (2) In keeping with the RoR theme, I could get "AJAX on Rails"

What do you suggest?

Cheers Mohit.

Hi Mohit,

Mohit Sindhwani wrote:

I'm wondering which of the following I should buy: (1) In keeping with the 'Cookbook' theme, I could get the "CSS Cookbook" (2) In keeping with the RoR theme, I could get "AJAX on Rails"

What do you suggest?

My experience is that Ajax and CSS go hand-in-hand. You can do some Ajax using tables, but not much. Anything above the trivial with Ajax required learning XHTML and CSS. "The Javascript Bible" has also been very beneficial to me WRT understanding the JS that Rails was generating for me; especially useful in working backwards to figure out the parameters to the Ajax calls.

hth, Bill

Bill Walton wrote:

Hi Mohit,

Mohit Sindhwani wrote:   

I'm wondering which of the following I should buy: (1) In keeping with the 'Cookbook' theme, I could get the "CSS Cookbook" (2) In keeping with the RoR theme, I could get "AJAX on Rails"

What do you suggest?      My experience is that Ajax and CSS go hand-in-hand. You can do some Ajax using tables, but not much. Anything above the trivial with Ajax required learning XHTML and CSS. "The Javascript Bible" has also been very beneficial to me WRT understanding the JS that Rails was generating for me; especially useful in working backwards to figure out the parameters to the Ajax calls.

hth, Bill

Thanks Bill,

After what you say, I'm probably leaning just a wee bit more towards the CSS book then. It might be good to get a firmer grip on CSS and learn some cool tricks first, and to advance to Javascript and AJAX at some other time. The way I read it, cool CSS exists by itself but cool AJAX needs CSS to be understood :stuck_out_tongue:

Cheers Mohit.