I should note that this book is still excellent.

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.