BETA: Agile Web Development with Rails

Dave has released the Agile Web Development with Rails for beta consumption. The demand within the first hour has already been huge, so if your download takes a little longer than the 5 minutes, that's why. I'm really proud to see this happen. Many thanks to Dave and the people who've contributed. End of brief transmission from Brazil.

JUHU!

I can't wait until I'll get the paper book, but the PDF is great!

Was hopin to abuse the double sided printer at work for this one... 45 minutes after my order, still no PDF for me. Guess this is a good sign for you though.

Same "problem" here, 1h after, still no PDF. I think there are many people interested on RoR lately :)

I got mine within about 5 minutes of ordering, but I've been camping PragDave's blog all week in 20 minute intervals waiting. When it went up, I pounced on it -- then posted a comment on the other thread here. :)

Yuhu!! Finally got mine. They kindly send you an email notifying the availability of the download, so there's no need to be checking back every 5min :)

At first look it seems to be a great book :) can't wait the final paper version.

Took my copy a while, but as I sit here printing the first 100 pages I must say kudos! The book looks fantastic and the idea of beta booking is phenomenal. I plan to contribute feedback on any errors I might find. Great job!

Bought it, haven't had the chance to start reading but I'm incredibly psyched!

Bought the combo pack! Hope this beta-book thing catches on.

Cool book, thanks man. I am really happy to have such a reference at hand now. It is both tutorial and reference book as far I see.

Bought the combo pack, looks good. Thanks for the foresight of allowing it to be distributed this way. Now to print and bind it!

Combo here too! What I really like is that one must not pay extra in order to get the beta version. In effect you are buying the book in advance with the corrections and all for errors not yet discovered. By the time I will receive final version, it will have that smoothened finish with countless small corrections normally only present in an hypothetical edition 1.5.

I would hope to see other editors opting similar business models.

Hi, I just want to say, thanx for the BETA book. It was really great idea! :-) Now I've got mine. I appreciate you wrote the book for us.

When I clicked on your company link for Next Angle I received the following error. :-(

Proxy Error
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Apache/1.3.29 Server at www.nextangle.com Port 80

The book is looking very good. I read about half the tutorial section last night and it is very helpful. One point that had kept tripping me up was with controllers and models. In most sample apps, they are so simple there is one model and one controller. I was having a hard time grasping how to design a more complicated app where I don't really want a zillion controllers and the sample app they build addresses that. It will be invaluable over the coming weeks and I know that the access to the beta version will make an enourmous difference in the project I'm working on.

Thanks!!
-Tom

Damn! My hand is in pain...I mean for refreshing the pdf download page so many times

This is great! I bought the combo pack last night - and now I just finished printing it all out... sorry rainforrest :)

[BTW - The cyan toner was low *before* I started - good for me that it wasn't the magenta toner :)]

So thanks for publishing it this way. Good documentation is half the work... (Oops, did I really say that?!?).

And I'm sure this is going to become the standard way for publishing these kind of books. If I did have to wait until august for this book - I woudn't have bought the combo pack, but just the book.

So now (the reminder of this weekend) I'm going to rewrite the two J2EE webapps that I'm currently working on... :)

Regards,
Eyðun

David I'm really glad you pushed for this early release. I'd managed to get a pretty good understanding of basic rails stuff by the tutorials, examples, questions on IRC etc. But I was a bit intimidated for some reason by certain advanced features and so far this book has made everything seem as easy as the basics! I knew my app needed Ajax but was postponing it because I wanted to be sure to go about it right - after reading a few pages in this book I'm off and running with it, and confident I'm taking a good approach.

Fantastic book.

If you missed it, Matt Haughey, a guest editor at lifehacker.com for the week, snuck in a post about the rails beta book!

f.y.i. lifehacker has an average of 17,300 hits a day. ;-)

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/web-publishing/index.php#ruby-on-rails-book-as-a-download-105594

I'm poor and cannot afford this book. Can someone share the PDF with me please ?
I dream to learn Rails.

Thank you.

I have to comment that the idea of selling a BETA book seems a little preposterous and all this self congratulatory back scratching is out of control. Rails is great, don't get me wrong, but why not allow people to pre-order the paper version of the book and provide the BETA PDF version for free, especially since these people will effectively be helping you do your job. Charging twice for the same content in a different format is robbery, in my opinion. Thank god the music industry hasn't caught on and charges us extra for importing our CDs into MP3s on our computer. But I suppose if people are willing to pay for it, why not right? I'll be looking to grab a free copy of the BETA PDF book online.