A couple of weeks ago, Tomas Votruba emailed me saying that he just realized that we hadn't published an update of the book we wrote together since December 2021. The book I'm talking about is "Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring". Two years have passed since we published the current version. Of course, we're all very busy, but no time for excuses - this is a book about keeping projects up-to-date with almost no effort... We are meant to set an example here!
In the meantime, a lot has changed. Tomas has become a very successful legacy-project-saver, with this incredibly powerful tool called Rector. The project has gained a lot of traction in the PHP development community. Tomas and the co-authors of the project keep improving the tool, making it more useful, developer-friendly, faster, and more stable every day. Recently he released version 1.0 on-stage at Laracon Europe, in Amsterdam. In important moment, which indicates that we are dealing with a mature tool.
I know Tomas as a hard worker. He'll do everything to Get Things Done. He keeps simplifying things, even in the Git project that's behind the book's manuscript. Always looking for ways to prevent developer (or writer) mistakes and to automate common tasks, he ruthlessly cuts away unnecessary weight. When he reads a convoluted paragraph that works around some quirk in Rector, he fixes the issue in Rector, so the text is once more easy to understand. If people ask the same questions over and over again, he adds a helpful command to Rector's command-line interface, so the question will disappear. In other words, he has a great idea for feedback. What kind of signal does the code give us? Is this too hard to work with? Can we simplify this? What kind of signal do we get from readers? Let's improve!
With a 1.0 version for Rector also comes a new version of the book about Rector. This 2024 Edition provides an even better start for your static analysis & automated refactoring journey. I can testify personally: once you start, you'll never want to go back.
Read more about the updates on Tomas' blog: Rector Book 2024 Release with Brand new Chapter
And get the new version here: https://leanpub.com/rector-the-power-of-automated-refactoring
If you already bought a previous version, you can download the latest files for free (of course!).