Review: Agile Web Development with Rails 8

I’ve been following the books "Agile Web Development with Rails " since Rails 3 version. Sure, I’ll never be grateful enough to the authors for the efforts they brought to publish all these books. But as for its latest version, I can, unfortunately, notice the decreasing quality of the material:

  • in the Playtime section, there are some tasks/changes to implement. But if you are stuck, you have no way to compare your version vs the working one, as it is just impossible to figure out which depo_** folder matches which chapter. So you leave your application in a state which blocks you from moving forward.
  • there is no mention of how the source code of the ‘depot’ application has to be used. Instead of naming the folders according to the chapter, a weird naming was chosen: depot_a…depot_xb which provide no guess to which chapter it is related.
  • some tests are failing because of incoherence of the provided material.

Rails 8 bringing a lot of useful and more rich functionalities, the book just overflew them compared to the previous Rails versions. It is really a regrettable downgrade in quality.

Maybe the target of the book are those new to Rails so the authors just skimmed over the new features?

Didn’t expect that from PragProg. They have always produced quality books.