Christian Hellsten and Jarkko Laine feature Ferret and acts_as_ferret in their book Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce.

As a part of their example project, an online book store, they show how to realize a full text search with acts_as_ferret, from the acts_as_ferret statement in the model up to the controller action and corresponding view. They even cover how to index content from related objects - book authors in this case - through an indexed instance method.

So while we’re at it, what else is in the book?

Besides covering my pet project and implementing a shopping cart, the book shows how to do file uploads, authentication, tagging and a forum by introducing some well-known and wide-spread plugins like acts_as_authenticated, acts_as_taggable and acts_as_threaded. Also covered is multiple language support through the Globalize plugin.

However what I liked most about the book was how it handled testing. There’s no chapter named Testing your application, which is a good thing. Instead, testing is spread all across the book. For every piece of functionality that is implemented, the reader immediately gets to see the corresponding testing code. Really well done.

So, with the good coverage of useful plugins and the whole code a little, test a little process it teaches, this book is a great complement to Agile Web Development with Rails.