Pragmatic Rails Studio...these guys are good
There are two guys that have put together and are putting on what is called the Pragmatic Rails Studio. These guys are Dave Thomas, of Pragmatic Programmers and Mike Clark, of Clarkware. I would be remiss in not mentioning Nicole. Nicole is Mike's wife and has done an outstanding job of doing all, and I mean all, of the behind the scenes work to make this Pragmatic Studio on Rails, a really well-run event.
The event started on Thursday with a 1-day Ruby tutorial. Dave & Mike did a very nice job in laying the groundwork of the language and illuminating many of its most important aspects.
As we entered the "meat" of the studio, the 2-day Rails studio, Dave & Mike are delivering solidly (we're one day into the 2-day session as I write this). While based on the "depot" application as outlined in the Rails Book tutorial, Dave did a very enjoyable job of highlighting the fundamentals of Rails application development, covering everything from the Rails philosophy to Ajax-ifying a Rails application. Dave is a self-effacing, humorous and very talented teacher and presenter. The 2-man effort left loads of room to have Mike roam the room to help those of us (myself included) who were struggling to keep up with Dave's keystrokes. Mike did a masterful job in the supporting role and his style was a nice complement to Dave's.
While I was able to keep up during yesterday's Ruby session, today I made it through the first hour, before managing to run into an environment configuration problem. Tonight, I managed to recover my system to get to a working development environment in anticipation of writing our own Rails app at day-2 of the studio.
With all the hype about Rails, I do hope that these guys continue to feed the starving crowds with their wonderful educational methods.
[UPDATE: Here are some photos of the event that the team has flickr'd.]