One week from today our RailsQuickStart seminar begins in San Francisco. We still have some seats left, but they won’t last, so if you’ve been thinking about signing up, now is the time.

Chris and I have been hard at work on polishing all the course content, and I’m really pleased with how it has come out. We alternate between three kinds of sessions:

• Lectures, in which we explain the concepts behind Ruby and Ruby on Rails
• Live coding sessions, in which we build a sample application, while we explain what we’re doing, how to use the tools, how the sample app works, and the design decisions made along the way
• Lab sessions in which attendees work on their own computer and extend the sample app using assignments we’ll provide, or work on whatever they’d like help with

We’ve also put together a complete set of deployment recipes, so attendees will have their sites live on the web by the end of the two days, thanks to free one-month hosting accounts from Joyent. A few lucky attendees will also get a larger hosting package from Engine Yard. And everyone will enjoy some great food and an assortment of goodies courtesy of Sun Microsystems, whose NetBeans IDE we’ll be using in the class.

We’re setting everyone up with an Unfuddle account, which provides Subversion hosting with web access, a ticket system, and other tools to help manage your projects. It’s a pretty cool setup.

In addition to Christopher and I, we’ll have two very experienced Ruby on Rails developers on hand to help attendees during the lab sessions: Chris Bailey of Cobalt Edge and David Lowenfels of Internaut Design. Just having access to folks with their experience to answer your questions is worth the price of admission.

I’ve always enjoyed teaching a great deal, and I really look forward to next week. Back in the Microprocessor Report days, I taught many dozens of seminars on various aspects of computer hardware, and I’m thrilled to finally be back in training mode.