The first Rails book is out — in beta. Agile Web Development with Rails is not scheduled to hit hardcopy before early August, but people need the information now. What to do? Let people have a peak into the kitchen and get a taste of the messy reality of pre-editing. So if you can live with spelling mistakes, bad page numbering, and possibly technical errors, you can have a taste at the master tome of the first wave of Rails books.

It’s more than 500 pages of tutorial and reference on the Rails framework. We build a complete e-commerce application and go through all the sub-frameworks of Rails. There’s even a good 30-paged chapter on how to take your application online. Which web server to pick, how to install FastCGI, and all that jazz.

Buy the beta book now and you get the final polished copy “for free”. We’d be double happy if you bought the combo-pack, which also includes the final hardcopy book — but doesn’t hand all the cash to distributors and Amazon.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf has a lot more Rails books lurking under the surface. The success of this first title will be a good indicator for how many gets the “go”. I’m sure other publishers are watching this thing closely too in order to determine their involvement. So let’s make this the home run title that grows the market above and beyond.