Shopify Application Development

Working through this book during my winter break, I'm really enjoying the writing style and methodology. This book not only shows you how to build a Shopify App, but it also gives you the proper Rails workflow using Git, Github, Heroku, Rspec and Guard. Support publications should be downloaded from the author's Github account, not PacketPub.

Very detailed and Technical about using Shopify themes

I've been working my way through and while the book is aimed more at beginners, it feels like it answers a need that's currently absent in the Shopify app development community: clear, concise examples & documentation about how to build an app using Ruby on Rails. I haven't found anything else like it and while I'm not a newbie to coding, web frameworks are something I've not had experience with and this book is filling in a lot of gaps in my knowledge.

Hello all, I'm mortified this book is still available for purchase, and very sorry the code shipped with the book didn't work. And for those of you that reached out via the publisher, I never received a single email. I did see the Github issues and I contacted the publisher numerous times in 2014 and 2015 asking them to fix their distribution and about how to make changes to the book, to no avail. I sent them updated code AND updated copy fixing the mistakes that were noted by others. I also agree that the meat of the book is missing, I was asked to write a beginner's book but I think the time would have been been spent assuming average Rails proficiency and having beginners use other (and plentiful) resources for that. I've asked for this book to be pulled over the years as it is now largely out of date and I'd be highly surprised if the code works with the Shopify API anymore given all the changes over the last 7 years, and the Ruby, Rails, and gem versions are far too old and would be difficult to run on most modern operating systems without the aid of Docker. Again, I am very sorry that the end result of the process was a mediocre book of marginal help. -- Mike Larkin

I would have to say that this book is mediocre at best. It seemed like a great start at first, but I found myself skipping over the first several chapters as being completely redundant and not helpful. I suppose for a complete newbie to Ruby or Ruby on Rails, there might be a need for those first few chapters, but I don't think the target audience for this book is the complete newb (I could be wrong). If you're going to work in Ruby, you have to have some basic understanding of the language, and how apps are developed, before you can dive into something like Shopify and expect it to work. After all, this is NOT a WYSIWYG type of tool -- it requires setup, configuration, tailoring, deploying and so on. A new Ruby convert probably won't just pick up this book and start with it. If you skip over a number of the first few chapters, then you're left with the meat of the book. In this instance, the topic is at least useful. The author goes into the basics of Shopify development, including an understanding of what it is, how it can be used, and what you need to do. Half way through the book, I finally felt like I was getting to the good stuff. Unfortunately, the good stuff didn't last long. The rest of the chapters were helpful, but only covered some basics. I wanted to like this book. Although I don't have a pressing need for Shopify, I was curious about it and wanted to learn more. As a Rubyist, I'm always interested in frameworks and applications that use Ruby. From that perspective, the book seemed like what I was looking for. I would say it only satisfied about half of my need, though. The second half was decent, but short. If you're going to spend so much time going into the basics of Ruby and Ruby applications, then at least put 2/3 of the meaty content following it. Right now I only got a taster, and it wasn't enough to be truly helpful. I suppose if you're just looking to dip your feet in the water, or you DO have very limited knowledge of Ruby, then this would be a good starting point. Otherwise, I'd probably recommend finding a different resource.

I have agreed to review this comment at the author's request on 9/8/2014. Mike has responded to my problems after he saw this review on amazon. For that, I'm giving him another star. However, I am still facing the same issue when using Windows 7 64 bit, Ruby 1.9.3, Rails 4+. User of this book shall take note on the version of ruby before starting a project on shopify's app development. Currently, I'm trying to use the exact version of ruby on rails specified in the book on OSX. I will give some updates on that once the setup is complete. [previous review on 31/7/2014] Wilhem Pierre, I wish the author had replied to me like how he did to you. To be honest, you sounded like someone posting this review on behalf of the author. Glad that you find the book useful. Its been 3 weeks, I hope the author will reply to me once he sees this message. I am actually stuck at page 32. I did exactly what the author had written and several of my friends tried that too. We are all stuck at page 323, the TEST CONNECTION part just wont work. I email-ed the author twice about this, but he did not reply me. I cant seem to find any help from anywhere. Can you give me some suggestion?

Most of this doesn't even work as-is. Very outdated.

This book is full of errors and the passages are incomplete. Some of the codes dont work regardless the version of Ruby that you are using. Author did not specify the requirement of Javascript Runtime which you will need by intalling execjs and node.js. No help will be provided if you run into error because the author did not warn about this. If you are developing an app for Shopify, I would suggest you to learn Ruby from the basics and obtain help from shopify forum or stackoverflow. If you have zero knowledge of the Ruby language, I recommend you to stay away from this book. The author may be a good programmer, but he is definitely not a good writer.

Really good if you know a bit already, I would much prefer a video tutorial though, I would buy it straight away !