
Launch of the 3rd Edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial Book - mhartl
http://news.railstutorial.org/rails_tutorial_3rd_ed_screencast_access/
======
vqc
I want to echo some of the comments in here: it doesn't matter what you think
you will be developing with in the future, or what the framework du jour is
(although some may say it is still Rails); if you want to learn how to build
something, there is no better place to start than with this tutorial.

For all the "non-technical" people out there who want to see their ideas come
to life, who are considering hiring contractors or paying for a class, or
posting on HN or founder dating for a technical co-founder, stop. Take a step
back. Forget about your idea for a week or two and immerse yourself in this
tutorial and learn about what it takes to put something together. You and your
software related projects will be better for it.

~~~
increment_i
Does this endorsement also apply to people who don't already know Ruby?

~~~
vqc
I think it does. I didn't know any Ruby before I started the tutorial, and I
have long since forgotten the Ruby that I learned (because I don't use it
daily). But I think a lot of the value depends on what you are looking for and
how familiar you are with web development generally.

The magic of the tutorial (to me) is that it tries to package together the
entire development cycle for you. It gives you the foundation for building a
real usable, launchable application. Concepts like authentication and
authorization are extremely important and usually not covered very well. You
learn to set up heroku and push updates. You learn testing, version control
etc.

For someone who has finished codeacademy, javascriptissexy, etc., I think a
common problem is, "ok great ,I understand for loops, and while loops, wtf do
I do now? I have this CRUD problem I want to solve that no one else is
solving. How do I put it together? I want a login page. I need to input
information. How do I connect all this?"

Once you finish this tutorial, you know what the process looks like for Rails.
Then you can genericize your knowledge and explore Sails, Meteor, Django,
Flask, Ember, MEAN, Play, etc with a foundation and an ability to start asking
questions.

------
krat0sprakhar
Although I'm a Python/Django developer by trade, I can't stress enough on how
much book has helped me. As an undergrad college student, completely detached
from industry this book showed me how to use version control, how to write
tests and most importantly, despite the steep learning curve of setting up and
getting stuff running, how the end result of perseverance is extremely
gratifying. It made me fall in love with technology all over again. This is
the book I redirect all my friends to who want to start learning programming /
building stuff.

Thank you Michael!

~~~
mhartl
You're welcome! Happy to hear it. :-)

~~~
geoffw8
Hey man, me too. Read it 4/5 years ago, been coding ever since - its my day
job. Honestly thanks.

------
mhartl
I'm really excited about this 3rd edition of the _Ruby on Rails Tutorial_ ,
which is a huge update touching every chapter in the book (and adding an all-
new chapter as well). I'm planning on hanging out at Hacker News for a bit
post-launch, so let me know if you have any questions and I'll do my best to
answer them.

~~~
Hacquoil
Rails Tutorial (and Railsspace w/ Aurelius) are what I used to learn rails.
Your teaching style and practical implementation worked where other resources
didn't. Thanks so much for not only releasing this but continually revisiting
it and keeping it fresh.

It's also super refreshing to see the changes made to the TDD approach in this
revision. I run a small community coding programme for people new to
programming and whilst we love referring to Rails Tutorial (among other
things), the students often get massively disheartened when they have to face
the dreaded wall of testing before they can actually produce something
tangible. I completely get the merits of TDD, but I definitely favour the
'produce something interesting, get excited about it and then revisit it and
understand how it works' approach for newer students.

~~~
mhartl
Thanks for the kind words, and glad you like the new approach!

------
shostack
Congrats on adding another huge helping of value to the Rails community
Michael.

Once I have some free time and finish getting through "Agile Rails Development
4th Edition" I'll likely be taking another stab at your Rails tutorial. I
started learning Rails with the previous version, but quickly got overwhelmed
with things and needed to take a step back. I had an overwhelming sense that I
was just following the examples without really understanding why I was doing
something, why syntax was a certain way, etc. (particularly with unit tests).
Now that I've improved my overall knowledge a bit, I'm not as intimidated by
these concepts so should be able to make it further in your tutorial while
internalizing more than before.

Interesting choice to move to a cloud-based IDE and I can see where it makes a
lot of sense. That said, having recently started exploring the world of
Vagrant and Chef (and all the frustrations therein), it would be interesting
to go down that path as well to walk people through setting up their
development environment. Of course I can see just as many reasons (if not
more) for why that was not included in the scope of the tutorial.

~~~
mhartl
Thanks!

I actually made a VM using Vagrant when scoping out the 3rd edition, but
getting everything to work cross-platform was almost as much trouble as just
installing things natively. That's why I ended up going with the cloud IDE.

By the way, I recommend reading the _Rails Tutorial_ before _Agile Web
Development with Rails_ , which makes a good follow-on (as indicated at
[https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-
guide...](https://www.railstutorial.org/book/following_users#sec-
guide_to_further_resources)). But of course go with whatever works best for
you.

~~~
shostack
I hear you on getting everything to work...I still can't get Chef to install
the proper version of Ruby with RVM or install the gems I want. Finally I gave
up on the version issue and just did it myself, and then rely on gemfiles for
the gems.

Can you elaborate on why specifically you recommend your tutorial first? Are
there certain foundational topics you feel are left out of _Agile Web
Development with Rails_ that are important for a novice to understand?

~~~
mhartl
I feel like _Agile_ assumes you basically know web development. It has lots of
great material, but it's not structured to build up from zero, so I think the
_Rails Tutorial_ is probably a better place to start for most people.

------
briandear
The best part about Hartl's work is that it is "Rails Way" oriented. When I
hire a junior developer or bring on an intern, this course is a prerequisite
before I allow them to write any code. It provides such a strong foundation
into the Rails mindset that it's an exceptional tool. It ensures that all the
juniors and interns have a common experience, grounded in good habits. My
Onboarding goes something like this: welcome, now do this tutorial and here's
a membership to Code School for ongoing improvement. That coupled with pairing
results in a great level of beginning professional competence that generally
leads to higher productivity. The early time investment is completely worth
it. I do prefer the Rspec focus of earlier editions, however that's just my
bias and not based on anything rational. Nice work again Michael!

------
ndesaulniers
This book taught me an awful lot about software engineering. From learning a
little bit of a language, then learning a powerful framework, then going back
and mastering the language to mastering git (commit early, commit often!) to
test driven development to client side JavaScript, to serverside, to SQL and
relational databases. This book is packed and well worth its price (free
online, to boot!).

Michael Hartl, if you're reading these comments, I attribute much of my best
Software Engineering practices to you.

This book focuses on Ruby and Rails, but it is one of my favorite programming
books that I always recommend.

~~~
mhartl
Thanks so much for the kind words! I really appreciate it.

------
at_
As a generally inept arts grad that really has no business (/formal education)
in developing web applications, railstutorial.org is a big reason why I can
now just about pull it off. Must have tried about a dozen things, but that's
what got everything clicking. Take that, past poor decisions.

------
marcelsalathe
Fantastic, Michael. I can't overstate how much the book has affected my
professional career. I'm recommending it to anyone who wants to get started
with web dev. Thank you!

~~~
mhartl
Awesome, glad to hear it!

~~~
tikhon
as if you needed more testimonials michael, but this thread is full of them!
:)

~~~
mhartl
You were one of the first people I told about this idea (something like five
years ago), and were one of the tutorial's earliest and most enthusiastic
supporters. It's pretty cool to see how it's all come together!

~~~
tikhon
Thanks Michael! I've been following every edition since the very first one.
They get even better each time. Congratulations! Really impressive work.

------
bigtunacan
Loved your tutorial from when I went through the first edition a few years
back. I still recommend this as a starting point for any one new to Rails and
just anyone new to web development in general.

It's a great comprehensive guide to how things fit together that doesn't make
much in the way of assumptions about the reader's prior knowledge.

I work full time as a Rails developer and this is pretty much mandatory
reading for new developers to our group without previous Rails experience.

I would love to see you get some coverage of Docker in there. Heroku is great,
but virtualization is just such a big part of web development these days; it
would be a great addition to an already wonderful learning resource.

Keep up the good work!

------
cehrnrooth
This book and tutorial taught me my foundational web development skills and
was the reason I was able to launch my own start-up. I can't praise it enough.

------
joshdotsmith
I was a PHP and then Node.js developer for a total of two years before reading
Rails Tutorial. I was self-taught all along that journey.

Had I started out with this book first, the learning curve would have been so
much easier to traverse. I can't speak highly enough about it.

Using this as an into to Rails allowed me to become far more productive at
what I do, and frankly I owe much of my success over the past two years to
what this book instigated.

Thanks, Michael!

------
pavelrub
I started reading the draft chapters about a month ago - got to around chapter
6 before I became really busy with university exams. I haven't read the
previous editions but I really liked this one. I'm looking forward to
rereading what I've already read and finishing the tutorial when I'll have
some free time again. Just wanted to say thank you for the awesome job and the
hours you put into it!

------
bluedino
I got an interview at a Rails shop a few years back, was given a 'take home'
project, and found the print copy of this book at Borders. As I read the book
I saw that I could get the full version online for free! Amazing.

I ended up getting the job, then I found out they used Rails 2 (not 3, which
the book covered) so I had to forget a bunch of stuff for a year until we
started doing Rails 3 apps. Also found out they didn't do tests so I 'wasted'
a lot of time on those with the book. Rails was also a PITA to setup the first
couple times, thank god for StackOverflow and Ubuntu Forums. Either way it was
a great book.

I prefer dead trees and was glad to spend real money on the book. Borders,
where I bought the book is closed now, so I at least hope the author(s) got a
buck or two from it and it wasn't completely wasted.

------
sanimal
This book is still a great read even if you aren't planning on Rails
development. It's a great introduction to fundamentals plus it goes over
Bootstrap which is immensely helpful. If you are self-taught in another
language you can still benefit from this book.

------
philip1209
Today I discovered that Richard Feynman, also a physics professor, has a book
published on computation:

[https://www.scribd.com/doc/52657907/Feynman-Lectures-on-
Comp...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/52657907/Feynman-Lectures-on-Computation)

------
archildress
I don't have much constructive to add except my utmost "thank you" for one of
the most thorough and precise walkthroughs targeted at beginners. It is the
reason that I dabble in programming at all. Thanks Michael.

------
dtournemille
The second edition of this book was awesome, so I'm looking forward to
checking out the latest v3. The author is quite good at walking you through
the code examples.

------
jhwhite
Great book! I've been going through the draft chapters the past few weeks. I
organized a study group on Reddit to go through v2 of this last year and I'm
going to try and organize something again soon maybe do something locally this
time.

------
k-mcgrady
I might be missing something but is their a paper version? I hate reading
technical books in digital format. If not I'll probably still get the ebook
but paper would be great.

~~~
mhartl
Thanks for the question. As noted
[here]([https://www.railstutorial.org/#print-
edition](https://www.railstutorial.org/#print-edition)), the print edition
will be published by Addison-Wesley and is due out in Spring 2015. If you
don't want to wait for that, I recommend the PDF on iPad, which is my
preferred format for reading the book (even over print).

~~~
k-mcgrady
Think I might go for the iPad option. Thanks for your work on this. When I
needed to learn rails a few years ago railstutorial.org was invaluable.

~~~
mhartl
Thanks, happy to hear it!

------
faizmokhtar
Wow, this is great. This book is my goto reference when I was trying to make
my first Rails app. Definitely helps a lot. Kudos!

------
andrzejsz
Is it going to be useful for developer preferring local editor and all that
stuff instead of cloud IDE ?

------
bkurtz13
I'm getting an internal server error when I try to buy it... :/

~~~
mhartl
There was a hiccup with our Redis provider. Should be working now.

------
chilpol
When will this new edition of the book be published on SafariBookOnline?

~~~
mhartl
I'm not sure, but probably within a couple of months. I don't how much work
the publisher is going to have to do to put it in their format.

------
ksec
Default Stack means MySQL?

~~~
mhartl
Thanks for the question. MySQL actually hasn't been the default for a while, I
think back before Rails 2.0. The default database for testing and development
now is SQLite; in production, the tutorial uses PostgreSQL at Heroku. I
recommend eventually learning how to run Postgres locally as well, but when
you're just starting out SQLite is _much_ easier, requiring essentially zero
setup.

------
minimaxir
This submission is being vote manipulated, where the OP is asking for upvotes
on Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/railstutorial/status/522454707814817793](https://twitter.com/railstutorial/status/522454707814817793)

~~~
dchuk
The dude has consistently released the best Rails tutorial for free for years,
I think it's permissible for him to ask for some imaginary internet currency
to get exposure for the paid version that helps him pay the bills.

~~~
minimaxir
Upvotes determine ranking on the front page and consequently exposure. The OP
has a direct financial incentive from benefiting from this exposure, so yes,
it is a problem.

If everyone asked for upvotes based on merit, the system would break down.

~~~
adamnemecek
For most things, I'd agree but I also feel like OP has given a lot to the
community and it's not like you HAVE to buy the book, it's freely available
too.

