Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition beta book

analysis
Jul 15, 20081 min

Sam Ruby is updating Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition for Rails 2.1 in multiple passes. His progress reveals something about the issues that others updating Rails 1 applications to 2.1 will need to address.

I mentioned in Are computing books obsolete? that Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition covers Rails 2, but is still only available as a beta e-book. I have since gotten a copy of that e-book, and found it useful even in its partially updated form.

The new edition is being updated by Sam Ruby. Sam is keeping track of the update status of the book in the Preface. He is, in fact, updating the book for Rails 2.1 in multiple passes. As of June, here’s where he was:

beta book status

Of course, to make complete sense of the above status table you need to look at the book’s table of contents to see what the topics are for each chapter. That can be found here. The subheads correspond to chapters, and Chapter 1 is the Introduction, so The Depot Application is Chapter 5, and Chapter 12, which doesn’t work with Rails 2.1 just yet, is Task G: One Last Wafer-Thin Change.

The summary for most Rails applications will probably be “only minor changes were required.”

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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