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Comment by obiefernandez | Hacker News Reader

It's always an uphill battle for us (Addison Wesley Professional Ruby Series) to get official recognition from DHH since we're not part of the pragprog clique.

The latest rewrite of my book for Rails 4 is available at http://leanpub.com/tr4w

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial has also been fully updated. See http://news.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-rails-4... for all links to relevant material.

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That's unfortunate. Eloquent Ruby and POODR are two of my dearest Ruby books. Rails Anti-Patterns was another great book. If DHH and Co. don't want to recognize some of the great books you and others have churned out, at least take solace in the fact that many in the community appreciate your hard work.

Same here. My three favorite Ruby books are POODR, Eloquent Ruby, and Hartl's tutorial.

I LOOOOOOOVE Eloquent Ruby - Russ Olsen's writing style is so awesome.

Design Patterns in Ruby is just as enjoyable.

I have never heard of POODR before...but given that so many people are listing it in the same "top list" as Eloquent Ruby - I am definitely gonna get it.

Hartl's tutorial was a bit much for me. I don't think when I was just learning Rails, to be thrown into TDD was wayy too much and made it much less enjoyable.

I think if there was a "no-TDD" path, it would have been better....or maybe some way to explain the TDD aspect more clearly.

Thumbs up for eloquent ruby, fantastic book

I'd figure that it's more due to differing opinions on things like Test::Unit vs Rspec, Haml vs Erb etc than your publisher. Still, not a good excuse to go unrecognized. RW3 was excellent, and I'm sure 4 is as well. Best of luck.

"The Rails 3 Way" certainly wasn't excellent, it was clearly a rushed update of the original "The Rails Way", it uses a lot of old practices all over the place and the stuff new in Rails 3 is just added as an afterthought.

Author here. It took nearly two years to get that rewrite done. A lot of things changed in Rails 3 right at the end of our production cycle so admittedly it was a challenge to get it all to the finish line in the best possible way. That won't be the case with the new edition. I have a stellar team helping me get this done properly and we're using the excellent Leanpub system to release the book incrementally and ensure the finished product is of the highest quality. Much different situation.

Just ordered tr4w - at leanpub it says "These authors use Leanpub to publish this book independently." I'm just curious whether that's accurate, since you refer to Addison-Wesley as "us"? Thanks

I have a special arrangement with AW to publish independently via leanpub. Book will also be on sale via traditional retail channels once the hardcopy is ready later this year. We view it as separate channels. Traditional retail hits a different customer segment, especially when you start taking into account corporate subscribers to Safari and companies that do bulk purchases, etc.

Thanks for clarifying!

Co-Author here: I'm part of the team that is helping write The Rails 4 Way. Just to address your concerns, we have gone through the existing manuscript and removed everything that isn't best practice today. On top of that, we are covering all the new Rails 4 features, and important gems/techniques valuable to a Rails developer today. The second half of the book is going through a big revamp right now. Look for updates in the coming weeks.

At one point Rails 4 was considering Test::Spec, and I for one was disappointed when that was dropped, as it was an opportunity to standardise on declarative style tests in a lightweight native library, and might have stood a chance of building enough momentum to build a groundswell of support.

As it is, while one can of course still use Test::Spec, you're likely to be in a small minority.

Another co-author here. By now most people should probably already know that Rails has 2 default stacks: http://words.steveklabnik.com/rails-has-two-default-stacks

Since the Book is not 'the factory default stack of Rails' but rather the Rails "way" we certainly do have an opinion about what is considered the most popular and efficient way of building Rails apps. This does mean we use HAML throughout the book, because honestly, we all think its a better choice. Personally, since we converted to HAML at Astrails several years ago, I cringe every time I have to deal with ERB. Its just too verbose and it doesn't present the structure as obviously as HAML. Same for the rest of the 'opinions' in the book. YMMW

I'm not sure about that. Rails Tutorial uses Rspec extensively and gets some great recognition.

That's unfortunate because, of all the Rails books I've purchased through the years, yours and Hartl's are the best for my particular learning style. Doubt it's just me...

It's not just you. Our sales are very strong and growing year on year. I'm very happy with the perfoance of the series. Sandy Metz's new book is getting rave reviews everywhere.

I just finished Sandy Metz's book, and it is fantastic. Easily one of the best ruby books I've read; I can't recommend it enough.

What is her new book? I am assuming you mean the next book after POODR?

No, he's referring to POODR, which is "new" in the sense that it's been released recently compared to books like The Rails Way and the Ruby on Rails Tutorial.

well, I purchased "merb in action" and waited for a while when it happend. But IMHO, rails4 books are good.

Your book for me is the de-facto standard Rails bible and it's what I always recommend to new learners. I find it very strange that it's not the top official recommendation.

This is exactly the comment I was looking for. Has anyone read both this and Hartl's tutorial? What are the strengths of this book over Hartl's?

The Rails Tutorial is a step-by-step approach to learning web development with Rails, which covers selective features of the framework as needed, whereas The Rails Way is a comprehensive reference covering the entire framework. Between them, they're a good one-two punch to go from Rails newcomer to expert.

On Hartl's site, the most recent update is from May 15th for Rails 4.0 rc1. I'll feel more comfortable when Michael confirms the tutorial is valid for the final release.

I know for a fact he's been working a lot on it. I'll give him a heads up to come comment on it here. Stay tuned

I just pushed the update.

awesome, thanks

I updated the book for RC2 the day it came out (announced on Twitter at https://twitter.com/railstutorial/status/344981158825689088; it just didn't merit a post on the news feed), and I've just updated it for 4.0 final.

Just bought a copy. Was always a little bit tentative about reading Rails 3 way since 4 ways right around the corner. Glad to have it and you can't beat the price!

What does it mean when it says the book is 75% complete? If you purchase the book now, will it get updated later for free?

Yes. We're rolling out a new update this week. Been a tough confluence of events for me personally - demo day for my TechStars startup is 2 days from now