The pace of Rails development isn't a problem in and of itself, it's that the pace of change and the overall Rails development culture wrecks the documentation

The pace of Rails development isn't a problem in and of itself, it's that the pace of change and the overall Rails development culture wrecks the documentation ecosystem. Of the top rails documentation resources: * Rails Guides are still out of date and incomplete for 3.x series. I often have to go to the API docs since some big topics just aren't covered in any level of detail. * Railscasts deals exclusively with deltas-- new features, new techniques, etc, and no longer has a nice pedagogical sequence. The original tutorials are just plain out of date. (Maybe the peepcode tutorials are more up-to-date and comprehensive?) * Google. The biggest of all. Rails pace of change and its agnosticism means that the corpus of blog posts with recommendations, bugfixes, tips, tweaks, tutorials, etc, become out of date quickly, and more importantly it's extremely hard to tell what version of rails or of a plugin a given post or thread is referring to. A secondary issue: Rails newfound agnosticism (compared to its previous "opinionated" nature), along with the culture of the "flavor of the week" creates problems in the development and documentation ecosystem: * The plugin ecosystem: the "flexibility" of rack means that there are so many plugin options it's blinding, and the flavor of the week changes so often that it's hard to know if you're on a dead-end track or not. * Google: the same issue with Rails core changes applies manyfold to the development ecosystem: blog posts, stackoverflow threads, forums, etc are quickly obsolete and it's difficult to determine staleness and whether the recommendations are pointing to a development dead-end where the project is no longer under active development. The panoply of options and the chaotic development ecosystem can equally be attributed to Rails' newfound agnosticism, the development culture that engenders, and that chaos multiplied by the huge popularity of Rails makes navigating and getting things done difficult. It's my experience that Rails involves a lot more yak-shaving than it used to due to the issues above. I kind of wish there were a more conservative Rails community/blog/resource that issued recommendations and documentation/tutorials about a more stable way of doing Rails, making sure that the surrounding ecosystem is more stable and has less entropy than the community at large.