Sinatra: Up and Running [Paperback]

I can sense the quality of this book. As other reviews have stated, it is clear and concise, and I will keep it on my bookshelf for future reference. It has a certain zen feel, and if you can follow everything in this book, you will be a force of nature.

This is not, however a book for Ruby beginners, or for novice (or perhaps even intermediate) developers looking to Sinatra for an alternative to the complex behemoth that is Rails. Don't be lulled by the thin size of this book: it is dense. After the first chapter, when it considers the rich array of paths Sinatra offers, it delves into the HTTP specification, the underlying architecture of Sinatra, hacking the Sinatra system itself, Rack, and modular applications.

However, these deeper and back-end topics are the entire beast. Besides a cursory few examples in the first chapter, there is little attention paid to organizing applications, design patters, or best-practices. There's not much hand-holding, in other words.

If you see yourself needing to manually distinguish MIME types or define custom HTTP headers, this book seems great. It's a book for computer scientists looking to add another weapon to their arsenal. It is not a book for dilettantes or the inexperienced. However, I have a sneaking suspicion I will come back to this book after I get used the Sinatra system.

An interesting quirk of Scandinavian society is the concept of Jante Law. It knocks down standing out and being individual, in favor of communal harmony. It's typically used in a negative context to lament restrictions and lack of risk taking within Nordic society but the flip side of the Jante coin is "lagom": the idea and ideal of having just the right amount of something.

Sinatra Up and Running is, second to K&R, the most "lagom" technical book I've read. At a mere 102 pages you may wonder whether it's worth buying - it is. Unlike most technical books - yes, including mine - it skips the waffle and provides a perfect level of detail going through from what Sinatra is, to how it works, and on to an example project that covers just 13 pages. Don't be fooled, though, this isn't one of those tiny format O'Reilly handbooks; it's a regular, full size book - just a thin one!

It's a good book and well written. I enjoyed it and picked up or was reminded of quite a few interesting bits and pieces. I'll probably refer to it from time to time. If your Sinatra experiences are rather on and off or you've not played with it for a while, it's a great, well-paced introduction. If, however, you're already a Sinatra guru and/or working with Sinatra on a day by day basis and have all of the main patterns memorized, there's not a great deal you're going to get out of it. Buy it to be a completionist or to support the authors, but if you want a book demonstrating in depth how to integrate Sinatra with everything or how to big giant Web applications, this isn't for you.

Inexperienced Rubyists may also find the book's direct no-nonsense style intimidating. If you know what a code block is, you're good to go. This may seem like a bizarre observation to most Rubyists, but I've encountered many beginners who've wanted to "build a Web site" and immediately leapt into an advanced Rails book, only to be confused. If you're still new to Ruby, read The Well Grounded Rubyist or Beginning Ruby first.

And I'm going to stop here, because that would be lagom :-)

I read this book through in its entirety in just a few days. It was short but thorough, and I thought it covered all the necessities rather well. Even if you don't use either Ruby or Sinatra, I'd recommend picking this up to find out just how simple building web applications should be.