Added review for Beginning Rails 4.

Beginning Rails 4 - Gamble, Carneiro, Barazi
 
Beginning Rails 4 is a book exactly for me, but I am not sure how much it is a book for complete beginners. It is a great book, very unique, very tasty and full of valuable knowledge not just about Ruby and Rails, but also about testing, SQL, Ajax, Ruby community, etc.. I can say that it gives you the perfect starting point of everything you could need in Ruby on Rails application. That is a really complete approach, which I miss in other sources. 

On the other hand, I do not think someone without a previous knowledge of other programming language or without a bits of Ruby would gain so much from the book. It may seem overwhelming. Also some parts of the book were really hard to grasp, as for example introduction to Ruby - explaining classes and objects. The getter and setter methods which were immediately replaced by attr_accesor just confused me. 

The chapter I value the most is the first one - introducing the rails framework. I read a few other books or online tutorials about rails before but I have never seen such a nicely written introduction. I appreciate the explanation of web application in general, frameworks and mainly the part about agility. I think lots of people know what agile programming means, as did I in theory, but it was really valuable to me to read how exactly Ruby on Rails encourages this agility in practice. 

I also liked the explanation of Active record and Action pack.  For example the scheme 7.1 - The action pact request cycle really put everything what I have read into its places. I thing such kind of visual explanation are very important. 

Although I skip some of the parts, like the one about Ajax and CSS ( I hoped I already knew this stuff and I did not want to  distract myself away from rails), I really liked how the book is really full of all-around knowledge not just about Rails. You can find really useful overview of SQL in the appendix, for example, which I am sure I will have to read again very soon, since is very condensed for me. 

To summarize it, the book was very useful for me, I would recommend it to all beginning programmers who already heard something about Rails, maybe watched few tutorials but need a deeper understanding. It is also a great material to meet related tools which you will have to face as a programmer, and get a basic understanding of it. However, do not pick this book as your very first intro to programming or if you are not motivated enough - it may discourage you as it is not superficial nor easy.