

Is there any benefit to Rails 2? - piers

Ok, so I bit the bullet and bought the Agile Web Dev book that some people suggested here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101571 - thanks for that by the way!). It's a really well written book (so far), but uses Rails 1.8, not Rails 2. Is there actually any benefit to using 2 over 1.8?
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bscofield
Plenty of benefits; improved support for REST is a major one, but there are
tons of little fixes that make life much easier. The link in chaostheory's
comment is a good overview, or (if you feel like spending $9 more) you can buy
Ryan Daigle's Rails 2 PDF at <http://peepcode.com/products/rails2-pdf> \-
Daigle runs a well-respected blog that keeps track of the newest developments
in edge, so was able to pick out the most important things to write about.

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carpal
I think you might be confused between Ruby and Rails.

Ruby's current version is 1.8.6, while 1.9 is nearing an official release and
2.0 is still very experimental at this point.

Rails' current version is 2.0.2, but the last release on the 1.x branch was
1.2.6.

I'm going to assume that you meant Rails 1.2.x versus Rails 2.x. Yes, there
are a lot of advantages. Mainly though, there aren't really any disadvantages-
there's no reason _not_ to use Rails 2.0.

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dcurtis
The huge disadvantage is that there's a lot of misinformation in tutorials
now. The first page :scaffold section of just about every beginning Rails
tutorial is broken in Rails 2.

Lots of little things are changed. Some of them are confusing and hard to
decipher when tutorials and message boards say things should be working when
they're not.

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nickb
Forget about online tutorials... they're all skimpy and short on details. Just
get Obie's book 'The Rails Way.' It's definitely THE BEST book on Rails
available today.

[http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-
Professional-...](http://www.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Professional-
Ruby/dp/0321445619)

~~~
Tichy
That's why Java is still in the lead...

Edit: is that the Obie from the "do you think we are stupid" thread?

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raju
Yes, the very same Obie... And I agree... I just got the Rails Way, and from
what I have seen so far, leagues ahead of any other book out there...

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chaostheory
yes besides bug fixes there are performance improvements - db caching, new
features (in production all separate css files are combined automatically into
one), and so on

<http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done>

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inklesspen
The agile web dev with rails book is junk. Get Obie's 'Rails Way' book like
nickb suggested.

And yeah, there's some good new stuff in Rails 2.

