I’m a seasoned Rails programmer trying to get up to date with the newest releases. Right from the beginning of the book there were so many things that did not work that I really cannot recommend the book for any beginner in Rails. It actually started with `gem install rails -v 8.0.2 –no-document`. If you have any older Rails versions already installed using the same Ruby version this is going to cause conflicts. Solution: Make it clear to the reader that they should install a version of Ruby they do not already have installed, use rvm or any other Ruby version management tool to make sure this Ruby version is used, and install Rails 8 using it.

It goes on on page 66. `rails new depot -css tailwind` does not work. During installment a task `css:install:css` will be called which does not exist. This is a bug in Rails that has been documented a number of times. It should be mentioned in the text! From then on, generating the Product scaffold will not get you the layout shown in the book, and installing Tailwind manually later on will not fix that. I cannot imagine the book was worked through by someone before publication, and I’m seriously disappointed. On the Pragprog website, there should be a link to a page of errata in sequence of their occurrence in the text, not a forum where I can spend hours clicking around only to find the problem was never addressed.

I’m really sorry to be so negative, but I wanted to spend a couple of hours on getting up to date and not whole days on debugging the book.