Great news! Deploying Rails Applications is now a beta book! I’m a late addition to this project. I’m adding my writing style and organizational skills to the deployment skills of the heavyweights in the deployment field to produce what we hope will be a strong walk through the deployment picture for Rails.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Engine Yard founder) is the lead, and Geoffrey Grosenbach (topfunky) provided the examples and technical content. Brian Hogan stepped in with an incredible Windows chapter that we’ll be releasing soon.
If you buy the book at [Deploying Rails Applications](http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_deploy) you can get early notification when it ships, order a beta copy, and support the publisher and author that make it happen. I will be giving a percentage of my cut to charity… probably Homes Without Borders.
I imagine that writing a book is a little like having a kid. The pain of the whole process often makes you swear to never go through it again. I’m in this project because we needed to know a lot of this stuff at ChangingThePresent, but had to learn through trial and error.
Please help us make the best book possible. We want to open up the secrets of deployment to a much broader list of people, but we can’t do it without your help.
In the coming weeks, we’ll update the Capistrano chapter to handle 2.0. We’ll be offering an excellent Windows chapter in case you have to go there. And we’ll also offer a chapter on clustering and proxying with Ngnix (and probably Apache). Then, we’ll take a third and fourth pass through the book with the comments that we get. Please consolidate your comments through the book page above.
One final note. My next two live speaking engagements are in Orlando for NFJS, and in Austin for a charity workshop before the [Lone Star Ruby conference](http://changingthepresent.org/registries/show/412) . I’m tremendously excited to participate. We’re working hard to build better tools to support this kind of effort. Thanks to my boss, Robert Tolmach, for supporting this effort, and thanks to Damon Clinkscales for putting it together. It’s a tremendous amount of work, and he’s really making a big difference.