# Book Review: Agile Web Development with Rails 5.1

Ruby on Rails (Rails) is a web MVC framework used by a diverse audience ranging from students to large companies with hundreds of employees. Agile Web Development with Rails 5.1 does a great job closing any knowledge gap for those with a Rails application.

Rails is strongly opinionated. It favors a Convention over Configuration approach to most problems. I think that is why it provokes very different emotions on those who use it. Some people love it while others hate it.

I’ve noticed very few Rails developers take the time to truly understand how a Rails application works. These lack of understanding can be disastrous for web projects: wiped out databases, unmaintainable code, new team members can’t get the app running.

Agile Web Development with Rails 5.1 is a great book for anybody with a Rails app. It showcases the majority of the framework components in a very easy to read style.

Part 1: Starting with Rails

Covers how to create a new application, how to deploy it, as well as some Ruby introduction.

Part 2: Building a web store from scratch

My favorite part of the book. With very little code, the authors built a fully functional web store. They even wrote unit tests for every component.

This part of the book teaches how to name things and where to place them to leverage the full potential of the framework.

Part 3: Deep dive into Rails

In depth coverage of topics such as Active Record, migrations, routing, replacing Rails components.