The Rails Tutorial screencasts, together with the Rails Tutorial book, represent the culmination of nearly a year of effort. Hacker News readers can get a 10% discount on any combination of products at http://railstutorial.org/screencasts, including the recommended PDF/screencast bundle, using the coupon code
hnscreencasts
Be sure to apply the code on the checkout page to get the discount. The code expires at the end of the month.
As always, the HTML version of the book is available for free at http://railstutorial.org/book. Now that both Rails 3 and RSpec 2 are in their final releases, I'm also gearing up for the planned Creative Commons licensing to encourage translation of the book. I already have volunteer translators for half a dozen languages; email me at the address in my HN profile if you'd like to be part of the translation effort.
Congrats Michael! I've been using your tutorials as my primary learning resource for a few weeks now. It's the most succinct one out there and shows a newbie everything s/he needs to know to get up and running.
Hi Michael (if you're still here in the comments),
As someone who has read your book (I actually did the first 8 chapters of the 2.3 version and then went back and did the whole thing for Rails 3--it's fantastic, by the way) I'm wondering how much additional value these screencasts really bring to the table (at least, from your perspective). I can definitely see it for someone about to go through the book for the first time, but it feels like there would be a ton of repetition for someone who has already been through it.
That's a great question. Based on the feedback from some early beta screencast reviewers who had also read the book, I think you'll find the screencasts to be a valuable complement. To find out for sure, I recommend downloading the full sample screencast here:
If you find yourself learning something new compared to just reading Chapter 8, then you can be confident that (for you) the screencasts will add value over the book alone.
Thanks! There was an exception being raised behind the scenes on the production server that didn't happen on the staging server. (Isn't that always how it goes?) Luckily, the site handled the situation (sort of) gracefully with a redirect, but clearly that is not acceptable behavior. In any case, it's fixed now.
By the way, this is why I always keep an eagle eye on the Hacker News comments on Launch Day. You guys rock!
On a related question, is Rails 3 a good idea for any new projects (especially those using ActiveMerchant) .. or should one stick to Rails2 until all the plugins/gems are ported ?
In which case, this tutorial is not exactly relevant (for me) right now.
How do these compare to the PeepCode screencasts? I realize they're updated for Rails 3, but if you compared the Rails 2 screencasts to each other, how do they compare?
I'm watching the sample screencast now, and I have bought Peepcode screencasts but not for rails, but here's my impression.
The railstutorial screencast reminds me of railscasts - almost 100% editor/terminal/browser. Very hands on, very code-intensive.
Peepcode has a lot of organized section transitions, slides, visual aids, etc. The summaries and concepts slides are exceptionally useful. Also, Jeffrey talks about half as fast as Michael in railstutorial.
Both are great and I'm talking myself into buying the railscast package right now. I wish I hadn't already spent ~$100 on educational stuff already this month :)
If I recall correctly, PeepCode's Rails 2 screencasts are less than three hours total. That's fine if you're already an experienced Rails developer, but the Rails Tutorial screencasts are for people who want to learn Rails from scratch.
I recommend PeepCode (and Railscasts) as a follow-on to the Rails Tutorial. In fact, last year at GoGaRuCo I pitched the Rails Tutorial project to PeepCode founder Geoffrey Grosenbach as "From zero to PeepCode."
I've been working through the HTML version; great job! I especially appreciate the coverage of Ruby Version Manager, git (topic branches, merging), Heroku deployment via git, and TDD via rspec. You can read all about something, but it doesn't really sink in until you've typed the commands yourself -- even if those commands are dictated word-for-word by a tutorial. I generally dislike video tutorials, but will take a look at yours.
Same here. I went from knowing nothing to being somewhat proficient in about two weeks thanks to your tutorials. Thanks a million for the excellent help!
First of all, congratulations Michael. I'm guessing there is more than a year of effort involved. The video is clean and sharp. Good audio too. Well done.
I notice you used a 4:3 aspect ratio (960x720) and was wondering why not 16:9. There are screencast benefits to both so I'm curious.
The screencasts are also being published through Safari Books Online (via Addison-Wesley) later this year. (I'll include a link on the Rails Tutorial site once they're out.) The 4:3 aspect ratio was chosen mainly to match their request for a 1024x768 screen resolution, though it's also the aspect ratio of my monitor so it was convenient on my end as well.
I'm not in the target market. I don't like screencasts at all. And don't see many advantages of pdf over html for the ebook. I like html better. But your book is awesome and I would like to contribute something back. A paypal donate button on the book page perhaps ?
Screencasts are such a time-intensive thing to record, especially high-quality ones like these seem to be. Great to see these being made, though, because for a lot of people visual learning is irreplaceable.
It took me over a month (I work full time though) to work through the book and I think I understood 90% of it. I've learned a lot and I'm very thankful! Now onto the screen casts for hopefully that last 10%!
I used your tutorial to learn about rvm, Heroku, rspec, and of course rails. Not sure I can spring for $85 screencasts right now, but wish I could. Thank you for your work.
Congratulations Michael! Thanks for all your hard work! The Rails Tutorial has already been an indispensable source of information for both students and developers. It cannot get any better now when augmented by the screencasts!!!
Forgive me if the answer to this is obvious (I skimmed the linked page), but how much Rails/general programming experience do I need to be able to follow this?
If you're already familiar with MVC and have a basic background in scripting languages, 30 minutes or so of rails experience should allow you to follow the screencasts without a problem.
What is the best way to familiarize oneself with MVC, if one hasn't been exposed to it? I am an embedded programmer ("C"), learning web programming now.
I used Mockingbird (http://gomockingbird.com/) supplemented with Adobe Fireworks for the images. Mockingbird was free when I wrote the book, but I think they might charge now. It's still probably a good deal, though.
15 hours of Ruby tutorials? I hate to be a killjoy, but I recall there being a screencast that showed you (with, granted, a whole lot of magic pixie dust) how to build a blog in 15 minutes.
I'm not entirely sure that "More is good" in this context. But then, I know Rails already so I'm not part of your target market, I suppose.
Still, I would feel somewhat daunted by 15 hours of tutorials and 1000 pages of documentation. Sounds more like .NET than Rails.
Amazing that people can complain that an open source tool is too well-documented.
The famous 'build a blog in 15 minutes' was Rails' elevator pitch: intriguing, representative, but by no means a complete picture. You still needed a full reference to get real work done. That's what this is.
There's plenty of Rails documentation, as well as for-money books and screencasts, already in existence. Generally, the successful ones tend to be tight and light. "Agile development with Rails", not "Extensive 1000-page guide to Rails". Worth also pointing out that I'm criticising the commercial effort here, not the general goal ("help people use Rails").
Also, as I mentioned, I'm not part of the target market, so my criticism may be off-base.
You're right that 1000 pages might be a little crazy. As I noted in another comment, that total included the pagecount of the Rails 2.3 Tutorial book, which comes for free with any PDF or bundle purchase. The Rails 3 Tutorial book itself is only around 500 pages. I've updated the descriptions on the Rails Tutorial website for clarity.
You really need to watch "Lesson 2: A demo app". :-) It's my version of the "15-minute" blog, and even it is a lot more than 15 minutes because I go into considerably more detail. In the process, I enumerate all of the toy demo app's many failings, and then fill in the gaps in the subsequent 10 lessons. (If you don't want to buy the screencasts, taking a look at the free online book at http://railstutorial.org/book will give you a sense of what gets covered.)
The bottom line is that there's a world of difference between a tiny toy app and a real-world production app. The Rails Tutorial screencasts do teach you a toy app along the way (Lesson 2), but preparing you to make industrial-strength webapps is their raison d'être (Lessons 3–12). As it turns out, that takes more than 15 minutes. :-)
P.S. The "1000 pages" number included the page count of the Rails 2.3 Tutorial book, which many people won't need (though it's still useful for people with legacy apps). The Rails 3 Tutorial book itself is only about 500 pages, and I've change the wording on the site to make it sound less intimidating. Thanks!
There is a place for detailed coverage of the different topics. The 15 minute blog tutorial is great to give you a taste, but when you are new to a platform, its nice to have a more comprehensive resource that steps you through the details.
As always, the HTML version of the book is available for free at http://railstutorial.org/book. Now that both Rails 3 and RSpec 2 are in their final releases, I'm also gearing up for the planned Creative Commons licensing to encourage translation of the book. I already have volunteer translators for half a dozen languages; email me at the address in my HN profile if you'd like to be part of the translation effort.