AWDwR3 Beta 7
Beta 1.7 of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition is out; I just completed the most exhausting and time consuming portion of this task: attempting to examine literally every single page of rdoc trying to determine what should be documented and what need not be, and to compare that against what has been documented vs what has not. This is not as obvious as it sounds, as with all human endeavors there is a mix of pages which are autogenerated which only describe internal details, and other features which are highly dynamic which do not show up on rdoc pages at all.
I was originally intending to do this exercise based on Rails 2.1, but as there was a general feeling that Rails 2.2 was just around the corner, I waited a bit. It was released last month, and now that I’ve updated the book based on what was included, Rails 2.3 is again “just around the corner”.
Sigh.
Given that Merb is getting merged into Rails 3, it looks like being an author of a Rails book is a full employment proposition. If kept on top of, it shouldn’t be an issue. If left untouched for a year or more, updating it will likely be another herculean task. In all, I must say that this is the hardest I’ve worked on anything for at least a decade, if not in my entire career, so given a choice I’d rather keep on top of it. In fact, my publisher and I are exploring whether a subscription model makes sense for this book.
In any case, back to now and back to this edition, what should be left is only errors and inadvertent omissions. Whether such issues are numerous or rare, such issues should be quick to address.
A few highlights of this edition (as compared to the second edition) are as follows: installation completely updated, static scaffolding (don’t laugh, this completely broke the previous edition’s approach to the Depot application), a balanced focus on REST and non-REST interfaces, atom_feed helper, Internationalization, timestamped migrations, ActiveResource, and Passenger. And a bazillion or so smaller changes. A few things left for the next edition: JQuery, Metal, Merb, and Ruby 1.9.