Just curious, how far along is the Beta?

I purchased the 2nd edition a while back. I am only now getting back into Rails development, and would like to use a resource to guide me through the depot section of the book, with the changes of 2.1.

So my question is how far is the beta done? How many chapters have been covered? Half the book, less then half, more then half? Is it worth getting now and working through it?

Or is he just doing updates all over the book instead of chronically from beginning to end?

Thanks!

Every chapter in the current beta (1.5) works with Rails 2.1, with the exception of Chapter 25, Web Services on Rails—that chapter likely to be dropped in favor of ActiveResource. Not all of the new features in Rails 2 (e.g. ActiveResource) are covered.

i didn’t want to start a new topic, so i’ll append this here: will this book cover 2.2?

yes – the current beta already has a preview of i18n

Can’t wait :-)

Just wondering, do you have a date of when you will have the book ready?

@Rafal, on the title page, it says they plan to release it Dec 2008. The beta book is available now as a PDF.

Is there a specific release date for this book?

I would definitely like to have 2.2 covered. It’s so difficult to be updated on rails otherwise.

I’m a little frustrated.

If I remember right, the original date for completion was October of this year, no? While I understand the need to wait until a Rails version freezes until finalization, it seems like this is being used as an excuse to delay work on the book. The majority of the chapters have undergone only minor changes. There is, what, one new chapter? And there is some information on REST. (REST deserves more than a little attention from a book covering the upgrade of a framework specifically to better support REST.)

This book hasn’t been updated since September. What’s wrong.

When is the next update?

The next beta will be this week. It will be based on 2.2 (and mention some of the things that already have changed in Rails edge a.k.a. 2.3/3.0), and will cover Passenger, etc.

The October completion date was based on our understanding of when Rails 2.2 was shipping, had we known then what we know now, we might have elected to keep to that date and base the book on 2.1, but that’s water under the bridge now.

David: if you can be more specific about what you would expect to see covered with respect to REST, I would appreciate it. While REST clearly has gotten a lot of airplay in weblogs etc., the primary affects of this is in routing, a small bit of change to controllers, and ActiveResource – the latter being a new chapter in the book.

Sam – I think that it is great that the book has been delayed to cover the latest Rails stuff.
I’m impatient to get my hands on the next release but that doesn’t mean that I want an incomplete book. Personally I’d rather wait and get the up to date info as I’m relying so heavily on your book to show me the way.
If he book was rubbish I wouldn’t be so impatient lol :-)
It’s fantastic news that there is going to be a new release of the book this week.
I’ve just been having real headaches with blind up and blind down functionality jumping around all over the place and I picked up on JRails which I’m trying to understand how to get started with.
Would love to know if JRails and or JQuery are being covered as I know there were prevuous requests in here for this.

Hi sam, any updates on when the update will be available.

thank you.