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Will this make all my latest Rails 3.0 books worthless?

by clobber 15y ago

aaronbrethorst 15y ago
No. edit: Your printed technical book was essentially worthless the moment you bought it, given how fast most software evolves these days. But, I'm guessing you mean: 'will this make my book so outdated as to be worthless in terms of learning.' The answer is still no. All of the major new features are, essentially, optional, with the exception of jQuery, but hopefully you were already using that anyway. The Asset Pipeline, SCSS and CoffeeScript are major new features, but you'd likely need to read up on SCSS and CoffeeScript separately anyway. The Asset Pipeline can probably be understood with a couple good blog posts. HTTP streaming: same thing. Also, it's—again—an optional feature.
- clobber 15y ago
  Thanks. I was thinking how long it took for "Agile Web Development with Rails 4th Edition" to come out and now 3.1 is on the way. Luckily guides like railstutorial.org update along with new Rails releases.
elithrar 15y ago
I'll agree with aaronbrethorst here: your books are going to out-dated regardless; it's the major downside to software hardcopy these days, especially web-focussed stuff. Saying that, Rails 3.0 to 3.1 isn't like 2.x to 3.0 (where your books WOULD have been useless). A lot of the changes are evolutionary, and there's nothing stopping you from learning on the latest 3.0.x branch with your book before tackling the (fairly straightforward) 3.0 to 3.1 upgrade process, once you've got your Rails knowledge bedded down.
hakunin 15y ago
My rule of thumb: only buy tech books that primarily contain good practices by experienced devs. Good practices tend to survive longer than APIs, and provide long-term value.
- viraptor 15y ago
  There are exceptions though for the base software... Stevens' TCP/IP illustrated and Unix programming will be relevant for many more years, since they describe some pretty much frozen standards.
mhartl 15y ago
I can't speak for other books, but by design the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book is robust against this kind of change. The trick is to use explicit gem version numbers for everything. (I learned this lesson the hard way by watching my first book, RailsSpace, quickly go out of date.) Moreover, the differences between Rails 3.1 and Rails 3.0 are relatively minor, especially when considering how applications are structured. The Rails 3.0 knowledge you learn is still 100% useful. That being said, I'm currently working on a Rails 3.1 version of the book. Stay tuned to http://news.railstutorial.org/ http://news.railstutorial.org/ to get an announcement when it's ready.

Will this make all my latest Rails 3.0 books worthless?

by clobber 15y ago

Will this make all my latest Rails 3.0 books worthless?

No. edit: Your printed technical book was essentially worthless the moment you bought it, given how fast most software evolves these days. But, I'm guessing you mean: 'will this make my book so outdated as to be worthless in terms of learning.' The answer is still no. All of the major new features are, essentially, optional, with the exception of jQuery, but hopefully you were already using that anyway. The Asset Pipeline, SCSS and CoffeeScript are major new features, but you'd likely need to read up on SCSS and CoffeeScript separately anyway. The Asset Pipeline can probably be understood with a couple good blog posts. HTTP streaming: same thing. Also, it's—again—an optional feature.

clobber 15y ago
Thanks. I was thinking how long it took for "Agile Web Development with Rails 4th Edition" to come out and now 3.1 is on the way. Luckily guides like railstutorial.org update along with new Rails releases.

elithrar 15y ago

I'll agree with aaronbrethorst here: your books are going to out-dated regardless; it's the major downside to software hardcopy these days, especially web-focussed stuff. Saying that, Rails 3.0 to 3.1 isn't like 2.x to 3.0 (where your books WOULD have been useless). A lot of the changes are evolutionary, and there's nothing stopping you from learning on the latest 3.0.x branch with your book before tackling the (fairly straightforward) 3.0 to 3.1 upgrade process, once you've got your Rails knowledge bedded down.

hakunin 15y ago

My rule of thumb: only buy tech books that primarily contain good practices by experienced devs. Good practices tend to survive longer than APIs, and provide long-term value.

viraptor 15y ago
There are exceptions though for the base software... Stevens' TCP/IP illustrated and Unix programming will be relevant for many more years, since they describe some pretty much frozen standards.

mhartl 15y ago

I can't speak for other books, but by design the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book is robust against this kind of change. The trick is to use explicit gem version numbers for everything. (I learned this lesson the hard way by watching my first book, RailsSpace, quickly go out of date.) Moreover, the differences between Rails 3.1 and Rails 3.0 are relatively minor, especially when considering how applications are structured. The Rails 3.0 knowledge you learn is still 100% useful. That being said, I'm currently working on a Rails 3.1 version of the book. Stay tuned to http://news.railstutorial.org/ http://news.railstutorial.org/ to get an announcement when it's ready.