Customer Reviews

RailsSpace Ruby on Rails Tutorial LiveLessons (Video Training)

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Aurelius Prochazka definitely knows his stuff. Unfortunately, you probably won't if this is your introduction to Ruby on Rails.

With a ton of cut and pasted code, regular expressions and CSS, keeping up with Aurelius [much less understanding what he is doing] is tough even if you frequently pause the lessons. If you are not comfortable bouncing back and forth between a terminal window and text editor, the first couple lessons may be as far as you get before giving up in frustration.

At the same time, if you use these lessons with RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series), it is an excellent resource to see the work in action.

Still, I would recommend reading and working through the chapters in an introductory book such as Simply Rails 2 if you hope to get the full benefit of the DVD without getting totally lost.

Short and sweet, by teaching you how to create your own social networking site, you learn a LOT of Rails techniques. I am not a programmer, so it took me three months to go through the 16 sessions but it was well worth it.

Prochazka seems like a really cool guy, but his monotone voice puts me to sleep. 80 percent of this was him highlighting his copy and pasted code, and reading it out loud - without explaining why. The why is why anyone would learn, else, you'd learn better from looking through the code inside the railsspace book, or community engine or loved by less plugins. The advantage to doing that is that you'll be investigative, and proactive, instead of passively listening to him just read code off the screen.

Plus he's teaching on textmate, and the DVD doesn't work on a Mac! Makes me realize how good peepcode, railscasts and envycasts are.