Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, learning Rails from scratch can be challenging.

The framework and surrounding ecosystem have evolved so much that the experience of getting started now in 2012 is far more daunting than the one we early adopters encountered back in 2004 or 2005. Yes, things are more polished in many regards, but there are also so many more choices to be made.

What login library among the many options available should you go with? What testing framework should you use? What application server? These are just a few of the questions a beginner may ask. To complicate things further, not all gems and plugins that were in vogue earlier on have been maintained over the years.

When mentoring people who are new to Rails, I’ve had a lot of success with the Rails Tutorial (the PDF and screencasts) by Michael Hartl. My interns at IBM have absolutely loved it and have always been able to make major progress as far as their Rails knowledge goes in a matter of weeks.

I’ve shared my enthusiasm for this guide before, as it gets your feet wet right away thanks to its highly practical, example-based approach that doesn’t skimp too on much the “why” aspect of things. (It’s great when used in association with the official guides.)

I particularly like how it dictates making sensible choices and then guides the reader (or viewer) through the process of setting everything up, including the use of popular external services such as Github, Heroku, etc.

Well, the exciting news today is that Michael just released a second edition and it’s even better the first one. The new features include:

• Fully updated for Rails 3.2 and Ruby 1.9
• All-new design using Twitter’s Bootstrap
• Coverage of the new asset pipeline, including Sprockets & Sass
• Behavior-driven development (BDD) with Capybara & RSpec
• Better automated testing with Guard & Spork
• Roll your own authentication with has_secure_password
• An introduction to Gherkin & Cucumber

Based on my experience with mentoring and teaching Rails, I wholeheartedly recommend this tutorial to anyone who is just starting out or who hasn’t touched Rails in a while and needs a refresher. (Many things, such as the asset pipeline, have changed and affect day-to-day coding and deployment.)

Michael was kind enough to provide me with a coupon (ac25) just for my readers, which offers you a 25% discount until the end of April. If you plan to take advantage of this resource, grab it now and use ac25 at the checkout. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: The link to the tutorial contains my referral id. This doesn’t affect my genuine and very positive opinion of this great course.

Possibly related posts:

1. Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition
2. Interview with Michael Hartl, author of the Rails 3 Tutorial
3. Setup Ruby Enterprise Edition, nginx and Passenger (aka mod_rails) on Ubuntu

Recently Code School released their second course, which is devoted to jQuery (it’s currently on sale for $45, and is also available as a bundle with their earlier Rails course). The unusual name, jQuery Air, comes from the fact the course’s theme is airplanes.

The course starts with the basics of JavaScript; it doesn’t explore this area exhaustively, instead it tries to cover just enough ground to quickly move onto the actual jQuery material. This early phase focuses on the history of JavaScript, basic data structures like numbers, strings, arrays, and maps, as well as how to use named and anonymous functions.

The rest of the course covers everything you’d expect it to (such as DOM querying and manipulation, element visibility, timing issues, transitions, and animations). There’s also a bit of AJAX tossed in at the end for good measure, but not really enough to call it a topic that this course covers with any degree of detail.

Jeff Casimir is a fun, confident teacher with a clear, easy to understand style. He introduces you to some of the best practices as you write JavaScript and jQuery code, always reminding course participants about the separation of concerns/responsibilities when it comes to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

No bones about it, this is the best introduction to jQuery I’ve encountered. In few hours you’ll be able to understand how jQuery works, as well as how to take advantage of it for your own web applications.

If you watch the videos and work on the challenges tonight, you’ll be ready to work with jQuery by tomorrow morning. You won’t become an expert overnight, but you certainly shouldn’t be be leery of the DOM either. This course sets outs a very solid foundation upon which you can easily continue to build and further your knowledge of, and experience with, JavaScript and jQuery.

These days jQuery has become the de facto library for JavaScript development on the web, and learning it is now paramount for most web developers. Worth noting as well is that jQuery is also going to be the default library for Rails 3.1, thus making it of even greater relevance to many of this site’s readers.

As a prize for completing the challenges you’ll get a free screencast from Peepcode. I went with the CoffeeScript one, given that this will also be included by default in Rails 3.1.

Buy this great course now, thank me later.

I truly look forward to seeing further installments of this jQuery series, as well as more advanced courses that cover different languages and technologies.

Disclaimer: I received a review copy of the course. The links to Code School contain my referral id. Theses points do not affect in any way my judgment of what is, indisputably, an outstanding introduction to jQuery.

No related posts.

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 code/anti-patterns/habits into good ones.

Click to enlarge

As is often the case, the implementation is what makes this course really worthwhile. It’s Khan Academy meets Rails (and Khan Academy truly is the future of education).

Rails Best Practices provides a series of small videos that show examples of common bad code that may be used when trying to resolve a particular problem, then they introduce a refactoring that uses best practices to make the code a lot better.

In the process, these videos end up introducing some of the latest tools and features that are available in Rails 3. So if you haven’t made the switch yet from Rails 2 to Rails 3, you’ll find the videos particularly interesting.

This course isn’t just a collection of well produced videos and downloadable slides though. It’s dived into five levels, akin in that regard to a video game. To proceed to the next level, you need to correctly complete and submit all of the exercises for the current level. Each exercise will award you 250 points.

While working on very practical exercises, you’ll be able to reference the videos and re-watch them as often as you please. You’re also able to make mistakes and then see the exceptions that are raised by Ruby.

Click to enlarge

When you complete a level, you’re awarded a badge. As well you’ll receive a few bonuses once you’ve completed the whole course (including a free peepcode.com screencast, $5 codeschool.com credit towards your next purchase, and 35% off all books at InformIT).

I’m a firm believer that the approach to learning in which one is taught by doing exercises in a game-like setting is a highly effective way to help retain the material you’ve has studied. (I should mention that there is a support forum as well, just in case you’re stuck or need some help.)

At $75, this course isn’t exactly a bargain basement deal, however it’s currently on sale for a considerably more wallet friendly $45, and you’ll definitely get your money’s worth if you are a Rails developer.

In conclusion, given that levels are not visible until you pass them, here is the complete table of content, including all the levels, for this course.

Level 1 & 2

• Skinny Controller, Fat Model
• Scope it out
• Fantastic Filters
• Nested Attributes
• Models without the DB
• Really REST
• Enter the Presenters
• Memoization
• Reject SQL Injection
• Rails 3 Responder Syntax

Level 3 and 4

• Loving your Indices
• Protecting your Attributes
• Default Values
• Proper use of Callbacks
• Sowing the Seeds
• N + 1 is not for fun
• Counter Cache Money
• Batches of Find Each
• Law of Demeter
• to_s & to_param

Level 5

• No Queries in your View
• Helper Skelter
• Partial Sanity
• Empty String Things
• Yield to the content_for
• Meta Yield
• Rock your Block Helpers

All in all, I was very pleased with this enjoyable course, and I think that beginner to intermediate Rails developers are the ones who stand to get the most out of it.

Full disclosure: I was granted access to the course for free, and the link to the course contains my affiliate id. Nevertheless, everything above is my frank and honest opinion.

No related posts.

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 below, and sign up with the site. Free hardcopies of DB2 books and exam certification vouchers are also up for grabs.

No related posts.

In this post, I’d like to point out a couple of resources that I think compliment each other well, and focus on how to upgrade applications, as opposed to simply providing you with a shopping list of features.

The first one is Upgrading applications to Rails 3, a screencast that was just released by ThinkCode.TV. This screencast is almost an hour-long and shows you how to port a real world web application from Rails 2 to Rails 3. As such, it can be very useful if you have existing code that you’d like to port over to Rails 3. The author ported a few large applications to Rails 3, as he has solid experience with it. I’m biased of course, but I feel it’s well worth $8.99. (Today only, use the coupon RAILS3 to purchase this Rails screencast for just $5.99.)

The second resource is the Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook by Jeremy McAnally. It’s a beautiful PDF that succinctly explains what’s new in Rails 3, as well as how to upgrade your applications to the new edition of the framework. At 10c per page ($12 for 120 pages), it too is worth the money in my opinion.

Regardless of whether you end up buying these resources or not, I sure hope you have extensive test coverage for your existing Rails 2 applications. In my experience this is a must, because porting complex applications to Rails 3 without solid test support is a definite challenge. Nevertheless, I feel that this major upgrade is truly worth it. Rails 3 really brings Rails to a whole new level and we, as a community, should be proud and excited about what lies ahead of us.

No related posts.

The initial line-up includes a freebie about solving ASCII mazes in Python (previously released), a screencast about jQuery, another about MacRuby and HotCocoa, and three courses that are in progress on Python Programming, Test-Driven Development, and open source document management. Further interesting screencasts will be released soon.

Check out the catalog, and feel free to read more details about today’s launch over at the official blog.

Possibly related posts:

1. Announcing ThinkCode.TV’s new English newsletter
2. Free Python screencast about solving mazes
3. Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement

In order to download the screencast, you don’t need a credit card, to provide your address or even your last name. Just head on over to this page and join the newsletter. Upon confirming your subscription, you will immediately receive an email with links to DRM-free, 720p HD files in the formats QuickTime Movie (.mov), AVI and Ogg Theora (.ogv). These videos are in English, prepared by a published serial author on the subject of Python/Django, and narrated by a native English speaker. They also include optional subtitles in the .srt format, as well as the source code which is released under the MIT license, as is customary for ThinkCode.TV to do.

I hope you enjoy the free screencast and stay tuned for the launch in three weeks.

Possibly related posts:

1. Announcing ThinkCode.TV’s new English newsletter
2. Ruby 1.9 screencasts plus an announcement
3. Screencast on how to install DB2 Express-C on Mac OS X

In fact, over the past few days I have been contacted by several people who were curious about ThinkCode, some of whom asked me to send them an email when we release English content. Meanwhile, we found our second native English speaker (who’s a very solid programmer) who agreed to work with us to narrate and create original English videos.

It’s clear that things are moving fast and we realized that the presence of two distinct product lines, one in English and one in Italian, generally appeals to two different audiences. As such having a single (Italian) newsletter just won’t cut it. So today, we are pleased to announce our English newsletter, which I invite you to join if you want to stay in the loop. We haven’t decided yet if we are going the “private beta” route or not, but joining today will guarantee you early access if we do.

This way, English speakers can join our English newsletter (where only English content will be announced or discussed), and Italians on the other hand can continue to join our Italian newsletter (in which both Italian and English content will be announced in Italian; this to account for the fact that some Italians may be interested in purchasing products that are available in English only).

We’re really excited by positive responses we’ve already received and are really looking forward to providing you with amazing educational material. If you are interested in becoming an author, are a company who would like to strike up a partnership with us so that we can adapt and sell your videos in Italian, or simply would like to get in touch, please drop us a line at info@thinkcode.tv.

No related posts.

Speaking of screencasts, in Italy I had a chance to pre-announce my “startup on the side”. It’s called ThinkCode.TV and will, you guessed it, create and sell high quality screencasts about programming. ThinkCode.TV was founded with a couple of friends of mine who are top notch programmers and teachers respectively in the Python and the XP/Agile world. Initially we’ll focus on the Italian market (the three of us are Italian) by producing screencasts in Italian about Ruby, Python and TDD. But we plan to expand our horizons, by covering more subjects, accepting external authors, and eventually expanding to the international market by migrating our best sellers to English versions, narrated by native English speakers (to save you the hassle of having to hear a foreign accent).

Should things go well, we may expand beyond the Italian and English markets. But for the time being, I invite Italian speakers to join our newsletter (which is in Italian) to learn about the development of this project and be advised of when we release the first videos. When we branch out to the English speaking world, my readers who don’t speak Italian, will be able to learn about it through this blog.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.