jQuery Air: An outstanding introduction to jQuery

Code School is a fascinating new provider of video lessons for programmers. In the past I reviewed their Rails Best Practices course and certainly didn’t hide the fact that I’m a fan of their approach. It combines modular video lessons with practical exercises (called challenges), game-like rewards with scores and virtual badges, and also includes a handy support forum in case you get stuck. Recently Code...

Review of Rails Best Practices

Over the weekend I had a chance to play around a bit with Rails Best Practices, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts I had regarding it. In the startup world we often debate the merit of ideas vs execution. In this particular case, the idea behind this product is pretty straightforward. It’s a video course about common idioms and best practices in Rails, that helps you learn how to refactor bad Rails...

DB2 University goes live

DB2 University is a website that’s aimed at providing (mostly free) database courses. Its public beta went live today. While the focus is clearly on the free DB2 Express-C — as the name implies — the initial lineup of free courses already includes “SQL Fundamentals I”, which is a course that’s worth following regardless of your database of choice. Feel free to watch the intro...

Upgrading to Rails 3

Rails 3 is a major upgrade; using it almost feels like working with an entirely new framework. Porting existing applications and acquiring the skills required to build new ones entails a significant amount of effort. You could scout the net for bits and pieces of information, but that would be time consuming and possibly frustrating. Thankfully there are resources available that have done the work for you, so you...

ThinkCode.TV’s English Catalog Goes Live

This is a short post to announce that ThinkCode.TV has finally gone live. Well, technically the Italian site has been live for months and is a favorite of many Italian programmers. Today however, is the first day in the life of the English version of ThinkCode.TV. The initial line-up includes a freebie about solving ASCII mazes in Python (previously released), a screencast about jQuery, another about MacRuby and...

Free Python screencast about solving mazes

ThinkCode.TV’s English site is going to be launched on April 19th. To celebrate the upcoming launch and whet your appetite, a 19 minute long screencast about solving ASCII mazes with a few lines of Python code was just released for free. This video serves to illustrate Python’s elegance and power, as well as ThinkCode.TV’s approach to screencasts and education. In order to download the screencast,...

Announcing ThinkCode.TV’s new English newsletter

Ten days ago I mentioned ThinkCode.TV, my startup on the side, the aim of which will be to produce high quality screencasts about programming, both in English and Italian. My two co-founders and I are relatively well known in Italy, so I was expecting the announcement to generate some buzz in my home country. What surprised me though was finding out that my informal pre-announcement generated quite a bit of interest...

Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement

Previously I mentioned the importance of migrating away from Ruby 1.8, in favor of 1.9. Before my business trip to Italy, I had a chance to watch David A. Black’s new videos for Envycast, in which he presents the essential concepts required to migrate from Ruby 1.8 to 1.9. This pair of videos totals roughly an hour and a quarter, and can be purchased in a package deal for $16. You probably won’t find...

Screencast on how to install DB2 Express-C on Mac OS X

Over the weekend I recorded a screencast on how to install DB2 on Mac OS X. You can watch it below: Installing DB2 on Mac OS X from Antonio Cangiano on Vimeo. The blog post I reference within the video can be found here. Yes, that’s an Italian accent. I hope you don’t mind it. ...