Posted by David September 28, 2007 @ 12:43 AM
UC Berkeley is teaching Ruby on Rails in its CS198 Rad Labs class. The class is being taught by Dave Patterson, the creator of RISC, SPARC, RAID, and more. Quite an endorsement.
Ruby on Rails was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals,
then extended and improved by a core team of committers and hundreds of open-source contributors.
Rails is released under the MIT license. Ruby under the Ruby License.
"Rails", "Ruby on Rails", and the Rails logo are trademarks of David Heinemeier Hansson. All rights reserved.
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When I started my CS degree, I could choose from two courses: the regular intro to programming and the object oriented one. It turns out OO was all Java.
One day I show up early for class, and the professor asks how things feel so far. I say I’m disappointed we’re doing Java, since I hear C++ is where the games are. He said they expect everything to be Java in a few years.
We were both morons.
I just heard my school changed its intro class to Scheme. For an intro class, I couldn’t be happier.
CS programs should be teaching you theory and developing your skills, not giving you a trade that will be obsolete in a couple years. But teaching Rails, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Rails has taught me more than anything I learned in college. Most colleges teach you how to write a “quicksort,” but how many teach MVC or testing?
This is great news for everyone.
It’s UC Berkeley. Not UC Berkley.
But over all, it’s a great news and endorsement for RoR. Berkeley is known to teach and use various languages for their CS program. I’ve been part of it and proud of it. I think certain things have changed, but I had to take a C++ class, Scheme class, and an assembly class to start the CS program. From there, you have various electives. They used Visual Basic to teach UI design. They used Renderman (language) for graphics etc. And them picking RoR for their RAD class is great news.
Typo: “in it’s…”—> “in its…”
Damn. If only I was still a student there. Sorry, but I have to do another one: Go Bears!
I took the course last semester actually. We were mostly taught by a guy named Will Sobel (leader of the local ruby user group)
It was more of a “heres some servers, a quick intro to RoR, we’ll be here if you have any questions”. We then went off and did our own thing and presented at the end.
@sandofsk:
You’re STILL wrong apparently. Quicksort is way more applicable to computer science than Rails, MVC, or testing. Do you know the running time (big O) of Quicksort compared to bubble sort, mergesort, or the others? Do you know why it matters?
On a different but related note, the “all of CS in Java” movement is one of the worst ideas ever. Unless you know what’s going on under the hood at all times, you’re out of the game.
Do you know what ruby block creation costs you? How about implementing closures. Critical sections, locks, threads, computability, fragmented virtual memory (i can’t allocate this why??), it all matters. Java’s not going to teach it to you, and neither is rails.
That CS198 course is barely a course at all. It’s a DeCal meaning it’s only worth 2 units, and it’s taught by a student.
What’s more impressive is that CS186 (http://rhombus.cs.berkeley.edu:5000/f07) is now using Rails. That’s one of the main computer science courses taught here at Berkeley.
I’m teaching a student-led course on RoR at another leading CS university, Carnegie Mellon.
http://www.shivakaul.com/railscourse/
My course places greater emphasis on Ruby as a standalone programming language.
Harvard is teaching a class as well with John G. Norman. http://e168f07.7fff.com
Our class is cooler than your class!
“Teaching a student-led course”? Sounds like an easy way for a generously-compensated university professor to do a minimum of work.
...unless you’re a student :)
@Joe Ruby:
Welcome to the reality that is today’s 40k a year education.
@anthony
the course isn’t taught by a student. check the wiki link in the main article.
Sean, Did I ever say Quicksort shouldn’t be taught? When you understand the original post, you can impress people more.
Pretty shameful that all the video-introductions (like creating weblog with RoR) is in .mov format.
I don’t like Apple’s proprietary and ugly player.
Does anyone know if any Canadian universities offer anything like this?
For clarification, there are two Ruby on Rails classes at UC Berkeley this semester. One is a student-run class taught by a recent graduate while the other is sponsored by the RAD Lab.
I’m a TA in the class hosted by the RAD Lab. It’s taught by Armando Fox and Will Sobel. I also took the class last semester (with Hsui-Fan Wang) and definitely enjoyed it. It’s a project-based course and in my opinion provides a refreshing break from the rest of the curriculum, which is theory-heavy and provides so-so practical experience.
I’m also in CS 186 (the aforementioned databases course), which is also using Ruby on Rails for the first time this semester. Most of our work so far has focused on database internals and we haven’t seen much of Rails though one of our assignments will be a RoR web app.
I’m glad to hear Carnegie Mellon and Harvard are involved with Ruby as well.
I’m teaching a RoR course at Miami University in Oxford, OH: CSA 253.
Would be nice if they taught this RoR class online.
Go Packers!