Interesting marketing strategy. I received Design View #40, dated 1-6-2008 at 3:32, which had the link to this page with the legend, “Free Rails PDF: Only 3 Days To Go!” Upon arriving and clicking the download link I find, instead, the book for sale. Somewhat offputting, that…

It’s a bit hard to avoid. That newsletter was sent around December 15th. I’m assuming you got a copy of it on the 6th of Jan because that was when you subscribed, and you automatically get a copy of the last edition upon subscribing.

It’s a bit like subscribing to a magazine and receiving the current edition immediately for free. You get some good reading, but you can’t necessarily expect all the contests and offers in it to still be valid.

The books serve two very different markets. I guess when I said “plenty of other books assume that you are an experienced web developer who is already writing unit tests and adhering to best practice MVC principles” I really was talking about the Agile book. It’s certainly the most comprehensive guide to Rails out there, but if you’re just starting out and are not familiar with the terminology or the concepts, it can be enormously daunting and leave many of the basics unexplained.

A lot of the feedback we’ve had about our book is that it provides a solid foundation and does a good job of explaining these basics. And many of the customer reviews explicitly mention that they used this book as a starting point before moving on to the Agile book. I’d suggest that this is a very good path to follow.

…I was of the firm belief that this book is the best and easiest way to get up to speed on the Ruby On Rails framework

I saw that comment a few times before. Do you think it’s better than “Agile Web Development with Rails”? If so, why?