New Rails 2 Mini-Book

Posted by ryan
at 3:06 PM on Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Want a chance at a free copy of this Rails 2 mini-book? See how here.

Let’s face it, if you read this blog you don’t do it because of my extreme intellect or witty composition. You’re here because you want to know what stuff is makings its way into Rails.

With the impending release of Rails 2 you could spend all day scouring this site and the blogosphere to collect all the cool new stuff in Rails 2 from outdated posts … or you can head on over to Peepcode press and pick up my brand spankin’ new Rails 2 mini-book which collects all the new features in Rails 2 for you.

Deterred by the obvious lack of skill in my normal blogging? Then take a peek at the free preview to see if it meets your snooty standards before you drop any cash.

This is my first publication of any kind and can I tell you how great it is to be a part of the family of high-quality publications put out by Peepcode. If you haven’t heard of them yet – do yourself a favor and head over to check out both their screencasts and DRM-free mini-books.

Drop me a line if you have any corrections or comments to the book that you don’t want the world to see. Otherwise, comment away here.

tags: ruby, rubyonrails

Comments

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  1. Dave – October 17, 2007 @ 04:29 PM

    Nice! Is there a section on ActiveResource in the mini-book?

  2. Ryan – October 17, 2007 @ 06:12 PM

    Hey Dave,

    There is not a section on ActiveResource – that topic was deemed too big to be a part of this mini-book. However, I am lobbying to make it into its own mini-book at some point….

  3. Brennan – October 17, 2007 @ 08:16 PM

    I actually noticed this about an hour ago. (I get PeepCode’s feed, as well) I think the new features are simple enough and well enough covered on blogs to make it not worth using a credit on this. Sorry.

  4. Ryan – October 17, 2007 @ 08:29 PM

    Hey Brennan, don’t apologize man! That’s totally your call.

    I take the view-point that so many technical books are easily recreated by culling the blogosphere or pulling from multiple existing sources. The value is in the aggregation of knowledge in one source and the explanation of features with, perhaps, a slightly different perspective than other sources.

    If you want a life-changing manual then this is not for you. However, I do hope it can be the canonical source on Rails 2 features.

    Thanks for your feedback, Brennan! If you have specific suggestions or comments feel free to mention them as well.

  5. Philip Hallstrom – October 17, 2007 @ 10:31 PM

    Hey Ryan – Excellent timing. I’m starting my first 2.0 project right now and while I know I could figure this all out on my own for $9 I’ll let you do it for me :) Good stuff!

    Couple of things I noticed (that aren’t really important, but hey :) Not sure if you’re able to make updates or not…

    - You have some sections like this: ....

    <%= @blog.id %>_body”>.... Unless 2.0 has changed, shouldn’t that really be ”....id -%>...” to suppress the newline? Otherwise the class name is not going to be a single word.

    - On page 16 you refer to the obnoxious back-slash, but it’s actually just a normal slash (or forward slash).

    And one question regarding the implicit find caching… is there a configuration option to disable that completely application wide?

    Nice mini-book!

    -

  6. Ryan – October 18, 2007 @ 07:57 AM

    Hey Phillip,

    Thanks for the comments.

    • You actually don’t need the <= .. -> snippet in this case. I believe < -> is only useful in the non-output form of the tag (the one without the =)
    • Back-slash and forward-slash always trip me up. One would think I’d of learned by now. Thanks!
    • I don’t see a way to disable the query cache system wide. The easiest thing to do might be to put an around filter in application.rb that wraps all actions in a ActiveRecord::Base.uncached do ... block?

    Hope that helps!

  7. Ryan – October 18, 2007 @ 08:00 AM

    Whoa… something weird happened with my comment being nested within Phillip’s. Hope it’s a one time thing…

  8. Jeremy – October 18, 2007 @ 09:59 AM

    Congratulations!

  9. Kyle Peyton – October 18, 2007 @ 04:45 PM

    Pretty sweet Ryan. Way to go.

  10. Kyle Peyton – October 18, 2007 @ 05:02 PM

    Company bought your peepcode, thanks for all the information in one place.

  11. Adam – October 18, 2007 @ 05:19 PM

    Its good overview.

    If you do any updates of the PDF (if peepcode does that?), there is one thing for consistency on pages 17-18 in Namespaced resources. You start with the example of admin and posts on page 17 and then list the methods available with admin and products.

    I though asset hosts and asset packaging (did that make it into Rails 2?) features would have been worth a mention.

    Anyway nice work.

  12. Ryan – October 18, 2007 @ 07:16 PM

    Adam, great comments. Peepcode does indeed to updates and we already have several non-trivial ones in the pipeline. This is the sound of me shuffling off to my writing den to implement your suggestions…

    Kyle – thanks to you and all the rockstars at Viget for the support!

  13. ngw – October 20, 2007 @ 10:22 AM

    Very nice Ryan, I reviewed your book on my blog. Very useful, too much for just 6 euro :)

  14. Ryan – October 22, 2007 @ 07:12 AM

    ngw – thanks for the kind review! It’s amazing what a good exchange rate can do for the price, huh?

  15. 1012 – October 26, 2007 @ 10:48 PM

    Hey Ryan. The preview looks great, but I’m still pretty new to rails and am looking for an intro. Dows the mini guide expect rails proficiency or can I Ise it to get started? If not, do you have any suggestions? A lot of what I’ve found so far is a bit outdated after watching rails conf 2007. Thanks!

  16. Ryan – October 27, 2007 @ 08:43 AM

    hey there, 1012:

    The mini-book is intended to be a supplement to the majority of Rails 1.2 books that are out there now. So I would encourage you to buy the Agile Web Development with Rails book along with my mini-book to get the full slate of Rails features.

    Purchasing the Rails 2 mini-book alone will not make you a Rails expert. It’s only intended to get you from being a 1.2 expert to a 2.0 expert.

  17. Paul – October 31, 2007 @ 04:55 PM

    Good thing its available as pdf. I will read this on my phone.

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  19. jimbo – January 09, 2008 @ 05:53 PM

    slashes make a teepee.

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