ANNOUNCING AGILE WEB DEVELOPMENT WITH RAILS, SECOND EDITION
http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/
Rails has changed a lot since we announced the first edition of the
book a year ago. DHH says that the 1.1 release “boasts more than 500
fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors.” Who
are we to disagree?
To celebrate the release of Rails 1.1, we’re delighted to announce
the second edition of Agile Web D. with Rails. This is a
major update to the original, and we’re releasing it as a beta book.
So far, we’ve rewritten the Depot application chapters. They now
illustrate new Rails features such as RJS templates for Ajax support
and “has_many :through”. We’ve lost the SQL in favor of migrations,
and even include an rxml example, so we can show off RESTful
interfaces and “respond_to.” It uses the new rake tasks, keeps its
sessions in the database, and generally tries to follow all the
latest Rails programming recommendations (including dropping things
that are likely to become deprecated over time). The testing chapter
supports transactional fixtures, shows new features, and illustrates
the new integration testing framework.
Over the coming months, we’ll be updating the rest of the book. The
Rails core chapters will be revamped to show all the changes to
ActiveRecord, ActionController, and ActionView. The Web2.0 chapter
will be rewritten to illustrate RJS; and the deployment chapter
rewritten to use Capistrano and to show how to set Rails up in
production. All in all, the book will be significantly updated to
illustrate all we’ve learned about writing Rails applications in the
last year.
All this represents a bunch of totally new content—entirely new
chapters and largely rewritten old ones.
Today, we’re releasing this new edition as a beta book. As with all
our beta books, you’ll be able to download updates as we add new
content, and then, after we complete the book, continue to download
changes to this second edition. We anticipate that the book will be
finished in the fall, at which point the paper copies will ship.
However, we’re doing this beta book slightly differently to our
other ones. Rather than releasing just the new content as it becomes
available, we’re instead releasing a hybrid that mixes the new
content with that of the original, first edition. That way you’ll be
able to use the beta book as a complete reference that gets updated
over time. Each chapter is color coded: ones with a gray header are
from the first edition, while those from the second have a red
header.
From May 2nd onwards, if you buy the AWDwR PDF, you’ll be getting
the beta book version. If you want the paper book, you’ll have the
choice of buying the first edition now or buying the second edition
that will ship when it’s ready.
If you bought a first edition PDF from us on or after April 1st,
2006 (order numbers 27140 and above), you qualify for a free upgrade
to the beta book. We’ll be sending you instructions by email over
the next few days. (If you have a spam blocker, we suggest
whitelisting pragprog.com and pragmaticprogrammer.com–you’d be
amazed how often our PDF download e-mails get bounced.)
Visit the book’s page at http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails
to see samples from the new chapters and check out the changes for
yourself. Be sure to visit the “in-place upgrade” link to see how the
process works.
We’re really excited to be able to offer the most up-to-date
information on the amazing Rails framework. If you’re a Rails
developer, we think you’ll find this book an invaluable companion.
Regards
Dave T.
