The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.
Not anymore I guess.
- free to read digital content
- paid paper books
- paid video upsell
- multiple six figures of revenue
- frequent updates
We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.
Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.
And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.
Private networking, service discovery, built in static sites with a CDN, persistent disks, HTTP/3, cron jobs, health checks and more -- hardly 'just same thing as Heroku'.
Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.