The Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook by Jeremy McAnally
Rails expert Jeremy McAnally (Ruby Inside's "Top Hitter" of 2008) has been interested in Rails 3 for a long time, and he's dropped a lot of time into producing the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, a $12 119 page PDF (no DRM!) e-book that runs through the ins and outs of bringing a Rails 2.x application up to Rails 3.0 standards.
Forgetting the 6 pages of cover and contents, Jeremy's Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook is 113 pages of awesome. The Rails 2 and Merb journey to Rails 3 is covered at a high level to start things off, but you're soon brought down to actually getting your Rails application upgraded to Rails 3.0. There are a few freely available blog posts out there that cover some of the topics this e-book looks at, but if you want a single "how to upgrade a Rails 2.x app to Rails 3.0" guide in one, and without any hassle, the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook is a must buy.
Want to get a basic feel for how it looks? Jeremy has a PDF with some sample pages, but here are a couple of screengrabs too.. you should see it's a slick production:
$12 though? Is everyone just selling products nowadays? Well.. Jeremy first contacted me a week ago to get my impressions of the book and talk about pricing. He was first considering selling it at around $20 but I suggested he lower the price point - not because it's not worth $20 but because it's useful enough that everyone should feel good about buying it. Jeremy went lower than even my suggestion, though, so $12 it is.
If you're interested in Rails 3 and have experience with Rails 2, however, this thing is a good buy at $12 - it'll save you at least $20 of time's worth crawling through the documentation and 101 blog posts, though of course, you can still do that!
If you really want to get value for money out of Jeremy, though, you should also check out his Humble Little Ruby Book. It's free (readable online or as a PDF) and makes a great introduction to Ruby, ideal to pass on to your colleagues, kids, or whoever. If anyone's earned the karma to actually sell a product for once, it's this guy!
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:23 am
Interesting. But my question is : "Will the author of this book update his book if the Rails team makes new changes or adds new features to Rails 3 before it is released?". Because I'm pretty sure they will do...
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I'll point Jeremy here to see if he can answer that.
February 23rd, 2010 at 4:49 pm
@Nicolas: Oh yes of course. That's why I built my own app to manage the eBook assets; 3rd party sites don't let you update the eBook. I'll be making updates as they release RC's and final versions and will ping purchasers as new versions of the PDF become available.
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:42 pm
are there any official Rails dev team docs for an upgrade?
February 25th, 2010 at 4:21 am
[...] McAnally is a 120 page guide on migrating your apps from Rails 2.x to Rails 3.0. There's a review of it on Rails Inside if you want to learn [...]
June 17th, 2010 at 9:26 am
Thanks Jeremy ! getting closer to the RC, I just bought your pdf... and keep it open on my desktop....
I just wonder what could happen when the RC will be there ? upgrading from the -pre to the RC will be easy ?