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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

Kind of feel bad for this one: https://www.manning.com/books/phoenix-in-action

Still a MEAP, and only covers up to 1.3

Elixir and Phoenix seem to have very fast release cycles. I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing. It's great to add a lot of features, or remove the ones that don't really work, but it also renders literature obsolete pretty quickly.

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This book actually should be in great shape since Phoenix 1.3 included the larger re-org of project code. A book written for Phoenix 1.3 will be entirely relevant for Phoenix 1.4. I think we had a total of two deprecations, with no breaking changes. As another commenter said, our last major 1.3 release was 2017-07-28, so if anything, I would expect folks asking us to speed up the release cycle a bit :)

Yes the book will probably be mostly relevant technically. But from a marketing point of view, it's dead. If I know nothing about phoenix, I check the website and see that the current version is 1.4, am I gonna buy the book that covers up to 1.3?

Re: my comment about release cycle, you're right. It was probably more applicable to elixir than phoenix.

It's over 1 year for an albeit big point release. Not necessarily fast compared to Rails even in the early days [1]. I think the main problem is there aren't enough quality independent tech blogs like when Rails came onto the scene.

1. http://railsapps.github.io/rails-release-history.html

There aren’t as many, true, but I’m not sure you necessarily need them most of the time. You aren’t going to end up tangling with ActiveRecord, upgrading for two months, or running into bizarre class load issues. These just less magic to worry about.

Less releases with breaking changes definitely feels like a feature to me at this point. It's also nice that many of the libraries Phoenix depends on are decoupled from the core.

This reminds me of Two Scoops of Django by Daniel Greenfeld and Audrey Roy. When they first started the series, they were trying to pump out a book every minor release, but Django development is pretty fast. After a few versions, they decided to only start writing for LTS releases.[1]

[1] https://www.twoscoopspress.com/pages/two-scoops-of-django-1-...

The book OP mentioned is not an official one. The official book [1] is being kept up-to-date

[1] https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4

Two Scoops of Django isn't "official" either.

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