I am trying to help some people getting started programming on rails identify which version that advice found on web pages corresponds to, and am seeking advice and/or guides on how to do it so they don’t have to rely on me and/or waste time trying outdated advice.
Narrative: I am helping some people get up to speed on rails development, and their stock response to running into problems is searching google for advice. They’re using 2.3.5 and thinking of moving to 3. The problem they’re running into is that there’s a lot of advice out there specific to older rails versions (2.2 for example being popular) that isn’t identified.
I can usually figure out when the pages are old pretty easily, but they can’t (yet.) It seems like random web page authors don’t identify which version they’re using when they’re using the current version, and not all pages are dated.
This seems to be a general problem that will get worse — current unadorned advice is usually 2.3.5 and older unadorned advice is 2.2.x at this point, but people are moving / will be moving to version 3 over the next while and newbies will be stuck looking at a bunch of deprecated/incompatible 2.3.x advice without realizing which version it is.
Any advice / pointers / telltales?
Check out API Dock. It has an excellent, annotated, and more importantly, versioned documentation of the rails API.