tl;dr: The 3rd Edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book is out, together with early access to the screencasts (currently in preparation). Click here to get an automatic 10% discount on any purchase through the end of October.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the 3rd Edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book, together with early access to the screencasts (which are currently in preparation). Here are the main product bundles:

As a special launch offer, you can click here to get an automatic 10% discount on any purchase through the end of October.

The full screencast series included with every screencasts purchase, including the completed lessons (currently Lessons 1–4) and immediate access to new lessons as I finish them. I hope to finish the full twelve-lesson screencast series by the end of November.

The 3rd edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial has been extensively revised from previous versions. Here are some of the changes:

Use of a standard integrated development environment in the cloud, with a pre-configured workspace specifically tailored to the needs of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Use of the custom Cloud9 IDE environment eliminates the installation and configuration overhead encountered in previous editions, while also providing the text editor, terminal window, and filesystem navigation necessary to complete the book’s three example applications. 100% default stack. The 3rd edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial uses the default Rails choices for all relevant technologies, thereby substantially reducing the configuration necessary to get started. The excellent but syntactically heavy RSpec testing framework has been replaced with the default Rails testing stack (MiniTest), making for a much gentler introduction to testing than in previous editions. Lighter-weight testing approach. The 3rd edition still covers test-driven development (TDD), but uses it more sparingly and judiciously. The more forbidding “wall of tests” sections have been eliminated, with concise and expressive integration tests (usually written after the application code) taking their place. A completely rewritten chapter on login and authentication. The newly revised Chapter 8 covers all three of the most common login models on the Web: session expiration upon browser close, automatically remembering users, and optionally remembering users with a “remember me” checkbox. An all-new section on image upload. Chapter 11 now shows how to add pictures to the Twitter-style “microposts” developed in the tutorial’s main sample application. Topics include client- and server-side image validations, automatic image resizing, and using a cloud storage service (Amazon S3) in production. An all-new chapter on account activation and password resets, including sending email with Rails. The all-new Chapter 10 considerably extends the core sample application by adding account activation (thereby verifying the account’s email address) and allowing users to reset forgotten passwords. In the process, the chapter covers how to send email with Rails, both in development (using the server log) and in production (using SendGrid).

The final chapter list appears as follows (links are to the online version of the book, which as always is available for free):

As a reminder, you can click here to get an automatic 10% discount on any purchase through the end of October.

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