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 them to be as entertaining as the ones filled with gags by Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer, but in my opinion these videos are well thought out and highly informative. The price is fair if you consider that they can bring you up to speed with Ruby 1.9 in no time at all and with very little effort on your part.

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.