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Ruby on Rails FastTrack report

Ruby on Rails is rapidly becoming a mainstream technology. It has accelerated from nothing to the hottest thing in web development in the space of around a year. The FastTrack training course we ran on Rails a few weeks back proved to be popular as a result. Elliot Smith gives his impressions of the course.

I am a really big fan of Rails. And I mean, really big. I attempted to run a Ruby on Rails course about six months ago, when Rails was still in short trousers, convinced it was destined for world domination. At the time, no one cared, and we only had a couple of people sign up. I was disappointed, but knew I just had to bide my time.

Things changed after Christmas, with Rails getting a lot of coverage in the press, meaning there was a good deal of interest in our latest (free) Rails course (6th - 7th April 2006). We had a group of 7 attendees. I was quite strict on entry requirements, as Rails expects quite a lot of its developers: a good knowledge of object-oriented programming, plus a fair understanding of general web development. So all the attendees were already programmers, which made me a bit nervous - I knew the course would be more like a workshop than me teaching. I turned out to be right, and we had many interesting discussions throughout, with the students telling me where things had changed in the latest Rails (I wrote the course for Rails 1.0), and sharing tips and tricks.

I tried to cover a lot of ground (Rails is vast), and had far too much material. Ironically, we wrote far less of an application than we manage on the PHP course (in both the Rails and PHP courses, we work on building a CD catalogue - this is my "hello world" application). But we managed to cover all the core concepts: how Rails works, using the generators, modifying views, writing models, adding custom actions to controllers, using helpers. More importantly, we also covered a lot of esoteric Rails techniques which aren't that well documented: things like error handling, migrations (for writing server-agnostic database generation code), writing a Ruby module and using it in a Rails application, some practical Ajax, and a brief introduction to unit testing and the monitoring tools included with Rails. The main stumbling block for attendees who were already using Rails seemed to be deployment, and we talked a bit about decent Rails hosting in the UK and where you can find it.

All in all, a good time was had, and people seemed to find the course useful. The attendees also told me they enjoyed being in a room with other like-minded individuals who were also programmers. For the next course, I will be updating the version of Rails I teach on, and working on a more-focused application (I tried to do too many tables). Plus I might talk more about deployment with Capistrano (which I didn't mention). Definitely an enjoyable one to teach.