I am a novice Rails programmer, that much is certain. As a result, I'm quite happy to have Chad Fowler's "Rails Recipes" by my side. I have been part of the beta program for this book, so I've been reading it in parts for the past few months. It has been impressive, to say the least. As an author of my own "recipes" book, I am interested to see other authors' version of the recipe format, just in case I am able to incorporate something they do into a future book of my own. While Rails Recipes hasn't taught me much about writing a recipes book, it has taught me an awful lot of great things about Rails.
I look forward to using Chad's recipes in my current projects. I already have a couple of ideas, including prettying up my URLs and creating a custom form builder. If I had one criticism, it's the relative paucity of testing recipes. Writing Rails applications test-first is still a struggle for me, and I know there are those from whom I can learn. I would like the opportunity. (How many of you would like to come to Toronto to teach me?) I suppose I'll have to write a few testing recipes of my own.