Deprecated Software in Courses and Tutorials: Complaints and Suggestions.

Right now the Ruby tutorials are a bag of sadness because the instructions are out of date, the code relies on independent gems, and the tutorials are based in deprecated software. If these videos were freely available that would be one thing, but I count that there are 5,106 people paying for the privilege of using the Ruby Track which will all hit the exact same pits of pain I've named above.

My elementary math tells me that this track is one of the most popular, and that a minimum of $127,000 has been brought into Team Treehouse's coffers for this content, which is no longer useful and not labeled as such, nor updated.

The reason for this pain is that Team Treehouse staff violated core common sense guidelines and rules. Their work relies on others' software, which they can't control, instead of using the opportunity to teach us even more about coding. The staff failed to plan accordingly for updated versions of essential frameworks like Rails and Bootstrap, and it's not like those version updates appeared out of thin air without notice. Finally, the staff has failed to include any indicators that the content is based on out-of-date technology. RailsInstaller does not work on Mavericks, and I have had to hand modify rvm files to get everything working, for instance. Ruby is now at 2.1 and Rails at 4.0.2. Boostrap is at 2.3—there should be no tutorials on Team Treehouse which are not compatible with these versions unless there are explicit reasons to do so other than "but keeping up with software is HAAARRRRDDDD..."

A good fix for this problem is an Out-Of-Date tag on all deprecated content going forward, along with an indicator of when updated versions may be supplied. Barring an updated tutorial, it behoves TeamTreehouse to offer an additional tutorial which explains and offers workarounds in a non destructive fashion. For instance, Ruby versions can be controlled with RVM, but Rails versions cannot so unless there's a good way to manage multiple installs of rails then Team Treehouse could offer me a console based computing environment to follow the tutorials with that I do not need to set up.

I'm super frustrated by these problems, such that my continuing subscription to Treehouse is in jeopardy. Even book authors on Amazon are quicker to make note that their content has been obsoleted and will need an update.. and often they provide the update at the time the software is updated. If book authors can do this, so can Treehouse.