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 Development 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 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.
