Rails 3.0 Released (And 22 Free Videos To Bring You Up To Speed)

By Peter Cooper

Rails 3.0 has been underway for a good two years, so it’s with immense pleasure that we can declare it’s finally here. We’ve brought the work of more than 1,600 contributors together to make everything better, faster, cleaner, and more beautiful.

David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH rings the bell and announces that Rails 3.0 (final) has been released after two years of determined effort by the Rails core team (and, significantly, Merb team members, since Rails 3.0 is heavily influenced by the Merb merger). Grab it now with gem install rails --version 3.0.0 or, if you're in no rush, Rails 3.0.1 might come along within a week or two.

The Videos

DHH gives a quick roundup of some of Rails 3's new features but like Emma Watson's head PhotoShopped onto yet another naked body, it's nothing you haven't seen before. If you're really fresh to Rails 3.0, though, Gregg does an admirable job of boiling everything down into a digestible format with his (free!) Dive Into Rails 3.0 screencast series:

Ryan Bates has also produced a fistful of his typically succinct but precise RailsCasts videos on a wide array of Rails 3.0 topics. Ryan always focuses on code and practicalities so these are a good place to start if you want to follow along and do some coding yourself:

If you don't like videos, still follow the links, because there are links to the ASCIIcasts regular HTML versions of the Railscasts videos. These are regular blog posts that you can follow at your own pace.

Or some books

Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial book is the #1 (and only, in my opinion) place to start when it comes to books about learning Rails 3.0. Not only is it available to read for free online, but you can buy a well formatted PDF too. It's an amazing piece of work and, unusually, walks you through building a Rails app from start to finish with testing. If you want to just read one book/site and feel like a Rails 3.0 master by the end of it, pick RailsTutorial.org.

Update: There are now also 15+ hours of Rails Tutorial screencasts. They're commercial but make for great viewing and are the best way to get an "over the shoulder" experience of how an experienced developer builds a Rails 3 from start to finish.

If you speak German, though, check out this "Ruby on Rails 3" book by Michael Voigt and Stefan Tennigkeit. It's one of the first Rails 3.0 specific books to hit the presses.

Or just dive into some code

If you want to just "get started" and check out a working Rails 3.0 application, try Daniel Kehoe's Rails3-Subdomain-Devise app. It's a basic Rails 3.0 app that demonstrates using the Devise authentication system, as well as custom subdomain access. Not just that, but Daniel has put together a walkthrough of how the app works and how it was put together.