Highly recommended. The heart of the book, discussions in Chapters 4-6, on Active Record, Action View and controllers, are structured and clear. The authors have carefully prioritized the info that a beginning rails developer would need to know thoroughly, and presented it in short, to-the-point paragraphs, along with graphics (screen shots, mini-UML's for the active Record chapters, etc.) that reinforce the points well. Tables that give most common options for the feature being discussed are helpful, also.
I believe that the most difficult thing for a newbie is following the flow of logic in a MVC framework, from the web form that creates/finds a model object's params, to processing params in the controller and Active Record, including validations, showing errors and letting users correct them, CRUD processes in the DBMS and all the routing, renders and redirects that show users what's happening. The authors take each subtopic of Active Record, views and controllers, give an short, intuitive summary of why it's important, then give the most common use scenarios, along with common traps or misunderstandings that might arise.
Chapter 7, Ajax, tackles a large subject in a very condensed manner(they say as much on p. 228). While the overview is good, it's more like a 30,000 foot view that doesn't quite give you enough confidence to start coding in Prototype and scriptaculous. For that, there's the excellent "Ajax on Rails" Raymond book, as well as a couple others in the pipeline.
The rest of the covers testing, sending emails and deployment in, again, a condensed manner. Rails is a fast-moving target, there's a lot of topics that could have been covered here: rspec, test/spec, mocks and stubs, plugins to make fixtures usable, or avoid using fixtures, etc. But it's a great smallish intro to Rails. The appendix intro to Ruby is superfluous. If you already know python, perl or PHP, it might be all you need to get started coding ruby. Otherwise, you'll probably need a more complete intro and reference (Black's "ruby for Rails" is highly recommended).
So this is a topic-structured tutorial for Rails, in contrast to Apress' social networking and e-commerce books, which are project-based and present more code with less explanation (and covered more plugins like Ferret, acts_as_taggable, etc) If you ahve the luxury of borrowing a few different intro rails books , i would encourage it. One or the other method of presenting Rails may work better for you. But you can't go wrong with this book.
The typesetting is clear: code is readable, Tips and Notes are clearly demarcated. The one thing is tat some of the blurbs printed on gray backgrounds are a bit difficult to read
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