As part of the LearningRails morph from a plain podcast to an online course, we are transitioning over the next couple of weeks from audio only to screencasts and other supplemental materials. This week’s release of lesson 8 is all about setting up a new development machine so you can follow along with the course.

We wanted to have a set of instructions for the common OS platforms that we could tweak from time to time as needed for the online course and the in-person seminar. In February, we shared with our students a very basic outline and then pointers to some of the better blog posts and articles out there. Unfortunately, we learned that little things change with various OS patches and software releases, typically faster than these external articles are reviewed (if at all).

Long story short, we just published four articles, one each for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

After scratching out and running through these articles multiple times trying to get the bugs out, I’m dreaming about installers now. Please take a look and pass on any suggestions or problems you might have when trying these out.

We’ve enabled comments on article pages now, so if you have a good tip to share (or a bug), please add it to the appropriate page. You can find the current comment entry pod on the right side of the article, near the top (better UI is coming!).

-Chris

As promised, here is one of my occasional travel updates for those interested in meeting in person.

Next week, Michael and Christopher will be in San Francisco hosting our Rails Quick Start seminar on February 20th – 21st, 2008. We still have limited room left if you’d like to attend and get up to speed on Rails!

Christopher will be in Miami starting February 27th – March 1st, 2008 for the Future of Web Apps conference. He’ll likely be speaking about BuildingWebApps.com at BarCampMiami on the 28th.

Michael and Christopher will be at SXSW (South-by-Southwest) Interactive March 7th-11th, 2008 in Austin, TX.

We’d love to meet BuildingWebApps.com visitors or Learning Rails listeners. Drop us a line or catch us in person at any of the above events!

That’s a whacky title…

A few folks have asked if the next Learning Rails episode is still planned for next week given the overlap with our seminar preparations. The answer is absolutely! I’ll post again when it is out Monday, but in the next episode we are covering the basic concepts around testing in all of its various flavors. You’ll also have to excuse the coining of a new term…those of you who have known me for a while know I have a knack for naming things that become terms that just won’t die. In this case, after an explanation of Test Driven Development, I’m laying claim to the term for the opposite of “Test First Developers” being “Test After Developers”, as in “a TAD too late”. It probably isn’t clear where I stand on testing.

Although there is a lot of attention being cast on other “fill-in-the-blank” driven development, we’ll be sticking to simple testing and modest TDD coverage at our seminar. While I believe strongly in these concepts, the sheer quantity of new information for folks is overwhelming, and I want to keep with the general coverage of the overall getting started topic in an introductory course.

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.