While working on a roundup review of Rails IDEs and editors, I tried to draw on my large stack of Rails books, only to find that they're all at least a little out of date. For example, Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition basically covers Rails 1.2. Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition covers Rails 2, but it's still only available as a beta e-book. That may be a good thing, as the authors While working on a roundup review of Rails IDEs and editors, I tried to draw on my large stack of Rails books, only to find that they’re all at least a little out of date. For example, Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition basically covers Rails 1.2. Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition covers Rails 2, but it’s still only available as a beta e-book. That may be a good thing, as the authors will have a chance to add the updates for Rails 2.1. I don’t know if they’ll actually do that, though.The Rails Way covers Rails 2.0, but not the changes in 2.1. Advanced Rails Recipes is for Rails 2.0.2.Can books keep up with the changes to new software? Not just Rails: any new software. There are ways to handle change. For example, Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date is a combination of a loose-leaf book and Web updates. It was written for Silverlight 2 beta 1; beta 2 has now come out. Update 1 to the book came out in May covering the TextBox control and data binding, but no update for beta 2 has yet appeared.The necessity for that scheme, and the decreasing sales of computer books, raises an even more disturbing question: Are computing books as a category becoming obsolete?What do you think? Software Development