where form meets function

I love Ruby on Rails, it’s so cool.  It’s elegant, and it’s so easy to get started creating a functional website.  However, the development of the framework moves far too fast.  As a result, documentation become out-of-date fast.  This makes it incredibly hard to follow any sort of tutorial, blog post, or advice given in forums.

Case in point: the introductory tutorial for the “bible” of Ruby on Rails development became out of date when Rails 2.0 came out.  (We’re still waiting for an new edition of the book, which no doubt will be out of date by the time it prints.)  Instead of preserving older functionality, the development team removes it, which is fine, but they either need to slow down to let the students catch up, or provide a way for students to learn Rails without changing so much so frequently.

As a student of Ruby on Rails, I don’t want to be constantly looking to see what has been “deprecated” since the time my book or article was posted.

Any body have any ideas on how to cope with this?