Our hugely popular Ruby On Rails free PDF giveaway has resulted in us serving up over 1 terabyte of free PDF files!
Since the initial announcement that our beginner’s Rails book, Build Your Own Ruby On Rails Web Applications, by Patrick Lenz, would be made available in its entirety in PDF form for FREE, close to 50,000 people have downloaded the book.
Normally retailing for USD $29.95, the book has been completely updated with all reported errata, and includes an entire new section on debugging Rails apps using the ruby-debug tool.
Due to the large number of simultaneous requests, several people experienced problems downloading the book in the first couple of days. We immediately moved the file to Amazon’s S3, which handled the enormous load much more gracefully.
If you were one of these people, please try again now — this amazing offer is only good until mid-November!
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October 12th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I managed to grab one of these - highly recommended. Now heading off to order the dead tree edition to complete my collection :)
October 12th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Thank-you guys for releasing this book, much appreciated, I enjoy sitepoint books, now i have another.
October 13th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I’m sorry I had to pay for the hard copy, now it’s for free.
Strange way of doing business in my opinion.
Rene Simons
October 13th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Rene. The PDF is free for 60 days only, the hard copy is still for sale.
October 14th, 2007 at 1:55 am
I’m just wondering here, did you ever consider torrents to ease the load on your servers?
October 14th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Wow, that’s so cool! I’m doing a project using RoR and I’m so glad that I managed to get a book about it for free. Good stuff guys, a great book too!
October 15th, 2007 at 9:31 am
@hannson How do you time limit a torrent? Once it spreads you cant stop it from circulating as far as I’m aware.