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Phoenix for Rails Developers
230 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 2017
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May 18, 2020
This book was very disappointing, and not at all worth the high price tag.
I've been developing Ruby on Rails apps for many years, and have recently started learning Phoenix. I'd worked through Chris McCord's Programming Phoenix (search for that book on GoodReads to see my review), and it's obvious that Phoenix takes a lot of inspiration from Rails. What I was hoping for was a book that would translate my existing knowledge of Rails to the new framework, give me some learning short-cuts, and provide a clear map as to what the two tools have in common, where they differ, and how typical programming tasks in one might be accomplished in the other.
What I got instead was a very basic Phoenix tutorial from which you can get 95% of the value even if you've never written a line of Rails in your life. The approach this book should have taken is "here's what you know about Rails, and here's what you need to know to do the same thing in Phoenix." Instead how it reads is "here's how to build a basic Phoenix app, oh and by the way let me point out some totally obvious similarities with Rails that you've already figured out for yourself, such as that some of the functions have similar names and that both frameworks have concepts called the 'router' and 'controllers'."
It's a huge missed opportunity, and even if you leave the whole Rails thing aside, there are still problems. The example app is a simple, boring CRUD app that only gives a shallow overview of what's possible with Elixir and Phoenix; as a basic tutorial it really doesn't go very deep. For example, it doesn't say anything about LiveView, OTP, or Channels, and doesn't look at the front-end at all apart from telling you that Phoenix handles assets using Brunch.
On that last point it's out-of-date: newer versions of Phoenix use Webpack, not Brunch. That's because this book still uses version 1.3 of Phoenix; at the time of writing the latest version is v1.5.1. This also means that a few of the code examples are out-of-date and don't work (unless you want to install and learn a two year-old version of the framework.) Luckily I was able to figure out the cause of these errors and resolve them, but only because I was familiar with the newer, correct syntax from having already looked at other Phoenix tutorials. If I was a total beginner to Phoenix then these errors might left me stumped. This really isn't acceptable when the sales page for the book explicitly says that the book has been and will be kept up-to-date with the latest changes to Phoenix.
Finally, it's clear that the author isn't a native English speaker; a lot of sentences sound very unnatural, and occasionally they contain outright errors. The book is still readable, but the writing is jarring at times and it would really have benefitted from a proofreader.
Anyway, this eBook came with a 30-day money back guarantee and I'm going to make use of it. If you're an experienced Rails dev, I'd recommend sticking with a generic Phoenix tutorial like Programming Phoenix. I can imagine a great resource for Rails devs who are moving to Phoenix, but this book isn't it.
I've been developing Ruby on Rails apps for many years, and have recently started learning Phoenix. I'd worked through Chris McCord's Programming Phoenix (search for that book on GoodReads to see my review), and it's obvious that Phoenix takes a lot of inspiration from Rails. What I was hoping for was a book that would translate my existing knowledge of Rails to the new framework, give me some learning short-cuts, and provide a clear map as to what the two tools have in common, where they differ, and how typical programming tasks in one might be accomplished in the other.
What I got instead was a very basic Phoenix tutorial from which you can get 95% of the value even if you've never written a line of Rails in your life. The approach this book should have taken is "here's what you know about Rails, and here's what you need to know to do the same thing in Phoenix." Instead how it reads is "here's how to build a basic Phoenix app, oh and by the way let me point out some totally obvious similarities with Rails that you've already figured out for yourself, such as that some of the functions have similar names and that both frameworks have concepts called the 'router' and 'controllers'."
It's a huge missed opportunity, and even if you leave the whole Rails thing aside, there are still problems. The example app is a simple, boring CRUD app that only gives a shallow overview of what's possible with Elixir and Phoenix; as a basic tutorial it really doesn't go very deep. For example, it doesn't say anything about LiveView, OTP, or Channels, and doesn't look at the front-end at all apart from telling you that Phoenix handles assets using Brunch.
On that last point it's out-of-date: newer versions of Phoenix use Webpack, not Brunch. That's because this book still uses version 1.3 of Phoenix; at the time of writing the latest version is v1.5.1. This also means that a few of the code examples are out-of-date and don't work (unless you want to install and learn a two year-old version of the framework.) Luckily I was able to figure out the cause of these errors and resolve them, but only because I was familiar with the newer, correct syntax from having already looked at other Phoenix tutorials. If I was a total beginner to Phoenix then these errors might left me stumped. This really isn't acceptable when the sales page for the book explicitly says that the book has been and will be kept up-to-date with the latest changes to Phoenix.
Finally, it's clear that the author isn't a native English speaker; a lot of sentences sound very unnatural, and occasionally they contain outright errors. The book is still readable, but the writing is jarring at times and it would really have benefitted from a proofreader.
Anyway, this eBook came with a 30-day money back guarantee and I'm going to make use of it. If you're an experienced Rails dev, I'd recommend sticking with a generic Phoenix tutorial like Programming Phoenix. I can imagine a great resource for Rails devs who are moving to Phoenix, but this book isn't it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review