Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby by Chang Sau Sheong

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby by Chang Sau Sheong

Cloning Internet Applications with Ruby is a new Ruby book by Chang Sau Sheong and published by Packt Publishing. It’s now for sale at \$34.12 at Amazon. In India, it’s available at a special price of Rs. 837.25.

This book is for those interested in and with some experience with web applications. The interesting thing is that the author describes four well-known applications and shows you not only how to implement each one, but describes different concerns about each type of application.

The author will walk you through the code, but will not teach you in-depth programming theory, instead he will show you the parts that may be used to put together clones of these four famous services. He will also go over a quick history of each service type.

For example, you will not even get to page sixty, and you will have a URL Shortening Clone built and deployed. He shows you the ‘parts’ that you will use with Ruby to get it up and running. He walks you through the installation of Sinatra, Haml, and DataMapper. And then shows you how to use Blueprint CSS, Google Chart API, and HostIP. Alternatively, he goes over quickly how to deploy using Heroku.

The next application you will look at is TwitterClone.

You will use the following: JSON, GoogleClientLogin, Gravatar, and TinyURL, RPX (authentication provisioning service), TinyURL, and of course, Heroku for non-local deployment.

Like the first clone, you will review why he chose Twitter (kind of obvious, right?), how it is popular and valued, and some of the issues faced. He will show you a data map of the features, and by page 120, you have done it again, went from Design to Implementation, to Deployment.

The next exercise is cloning Flickr, and the author brings you the history, and overview, and then goes through the steps with you once again, to bring you to the last two chapters in the book, which clones Facebook! And it really isn’t as complex as you may think.

Have fun with this book, it will give you some insights, and may help to simplify a few tasks that you wanted to do, but were maybe intimidated by. It turns out, it isn’t as complex as it may first appear!

Have you read this book? Why don’t you share your experiences with us? Let us know in the comments section of this post. Thanks!