Rails 3 or 2.3.x?

Question

Am afraid this is not exactly a programming question. I'm beginning to learn Rails. Should I start with rails 3 or learn rails 2.3.x first and then come to 3? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

I recommend learning rails 3 as it introduces new sets of paradigms that will become the new Rails standards.

Answer 2

I would say rails 2.3.x first then come back to 3.

Reasons

• Stable release 3.0[1] / August 29, 2010; 26 days - wiki

so this is fresh , community is small. As you are new to this, i think if happen to have some problem with latest version in some way. you will find difficult to find answer.

• as you are new, based on rails 2.x you can find alot of tutorial, ebook and you can follow the step and it works exact. instead if you read a book of rails 2.x and try to implement in rails 3.x. may not work as expected.

• weak community for latest version, so i will suggest you to go with old and jump into new always safe.

Answer 3

From the August 29, the current version is 3.0. So if you've just started to learn it's a good investment into the future as you are learning something hot and new.

As for documentation you will find a lot of articles/videos/screencasts about version 3 as it is some kind of fresh blood that motivated community to create a lot of new materials you can learn from.

For example a nice list of sources can be found there: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2010/8/29/rails-3-0-it-s-done

I would not bother about stability - if you are just beginning with Rails there will be some time before you will get your app into the production. And at this time the stable version of Rails will be really stable.

Answer 4

If you are just now starting to learn, you might just as well start with Rails 3.1, actually. By the time you are finished learning, that will probably have been released.

Answer 5

I would learn Rails 3 for the simple reason that Rails 2.3.x is an evolutionary dead end.