Is the first Agile book still relevant?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi there,

I bought the first Agile RoR book a couple years ago and went through about half of it. I now have a project where I would like to try our RoR again. But I don't know if my book is now out of date. I assume Ruby has moved on since then, but not sure how much.

Can I get by using that original book? Or do I need to get it updated. I have downloaded the free SitePoint book (waiting for the link) - would that do as a replacement?

Thanks

Tom

2

Thanks - it looks like instant rails is no longer being developed, I downloaded Bitnami Rubystack instead (have not installed it yet) which seems promising. I assume gems is then no longer needed... The SitePoint PDF is apparently damaged and undownloadable (seems many people are responding the same thing) so I can't grab it unfortunately - did you like it?

3

Pixelmech wrote:

Hi there,

I bought the first Agile RoR book a couple years ago and went through about half of it. I now have a project where I would like to try our RoR again. But I don't know if my book is now out of date. I assume Ruby has moved on since then, but not sure how much.

Can I get by using that original book? Or do I need to get it updated. I have downloaded the free SitePoint book (waiting for the link) - would that do as a replacement?

Thanks

Tom >

if it is the version 1 that refers to Rails 1.1.x then you should get the next version since Rails 1.2 is quite different.

If you're thinking of going with the upcoming Rails 2.0 then the current version of that book is mostly relevant. Some things are (like view template naming) will be different - but it's mostly correct.

4

win32: Rubystack is supposed to be the path of least resistance (I haven't tried it)

http://www.bitnami.com/tutorials/from_instantrails_to_rubystack

BTW, you probably want to figure out deployment on RH or ubuntu or something sooner rather than later, and ubuntu makes it pretty painless. Dozens (maybe 100s) of blogs on how to install on debian/ ubuntu (apt-get or source.)

booklists:

the recent books are getting better and more specialized. e.g. the Apress rails projects one doesn't cover testing because the previous apress books did. Check Amazon for ~60 listings

5

Not sure what RH is, but is there a reason why I can't just continue using Windows XP for now?

6

It means RedHat.

Develop on whatever, just keep up with the deprecation warnings or prepare to not go Rails 2.0 when it's released.

7

Pixelmech wrote:

8

Yah, sorry, that is Red Hat. I think most people deploy on a linux flavor like Debian, ubuntu or Red hat/Fedora. I've read about Solaris and FreeBSD deploys too.

I did see somewhere a blog about developing using a Linux liveCD and saving your changes to a filesystem on a USB drive. But doing a dual- booting (with grub) install with the Ubuntu live CD on a Windows XP box is pretty straightforward, check it out. The only problem i've had is with getting dual monitors to work on a ATI card.

9

hi,

Develop on whatever, just keep up with the deprecation warnings or prepare to not go Rails 2.0 when it's released.   

and why exactly would that be? I've been using RC 2 for several weeks on my XP box without any problems. Out of curiosity, what's the reason for saying you cannot use windows for development under Rails 2.0? Maybe you were thinking about Ruby 2.0? (i'd bet there will be a binary for windows when ruby 2 gets released sooner or later)

regards,

javier ramírez