In case the public, scheduled training programs doesn’t fit your organization, consider Relevance for on-site appointments instead. Justin Gethland and team offers a wide range of packages. Including a 2-day Advanced Rails program.
Any other training offers out there we’ve missed?
Geoffrey Grosenbach has put together a Typo theme contest to get a whole bunch of cool new blog designs generated for the premiere Rails blogging engine. You can win the Rails book, a 4GB iPod nano, licensees to TextMate, and lots of other cool stuff. Make Typo pretty!
Jim Weirich has released Rake 0.6.2, which fixes the incompatibilities that earlier 0.6.x releases had with Rails. Just fire up gems and do “gem install rake” to get the latest.
Erik Veenstra has written a very cool guide on how to package Rails applications for easy distribution as native executables on Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Joe Heitzeberg is going to be presenting a session at O’Reilly’s upcoming Emerging Telephony conference on Asterisk on Rails. His work goes to make the open-source PBX easier to use from a Rails-powered web interface.
Dave Thomas and Mike Clark has just announced the Pragmatic Studio and their intentions to run a Rails Studio as their first workshop.
It’ll be two days of action-packed Ruby on Rails training that’ll touch on all parts of the framework. If you’re skeptic about the studio only being two days and whether that’ll leave to any usable software, they reply:
Can you really learn how to build web applications with Rails in two days? Absolutely! Now, if we were trying to teach you how to build web applications using Spring, Hibernate, and a mishmash of other J2EE technologies, you’d be away from the office for at least a week. Instead, by the end of the week you could have your Rails application up and running!
You should hurry, though. Signup is happening rapidly for the first date on November 18-19 in Reston, VA. The price ranges from $1,000 (single person including 1-day Ruby tutorial) to $650 (part of 5+ team, just Rails).
Since not everyone has yet switched to a Mac and can enjoy the benefits of TextMate, we need people working on better editor and IDE support for other platforms. RadRails is a project to build a cross-platform IDE for Ruby on Rails using the Eclipse platform. It’s still very early days, but they have an alpha out you can play with. And there’s a lot of activity around the project. Sounds promising indeed.
Tim O’Reilly recently did a piece called “What’s on Tim’s Radar?”. It features a handful of concepts and software that Tim O’Reilly believes to be “…innovative, world-changing, or just plain cool”. Guess what’s in that fine bunch? Ruby on Rails!
The quote:
Ruby On Rails: A framework, based on the Ruby programming language for rapid Web development, makes it easier than ever to build a site that draws on a big database. Presto: instant Amazons and eBays!
Writeboards are collaborative documents with version control, difference tracking, and comments. They’re created through Writeboard.com, the latest Rails application from 37signals. And if you happen to have a Backpack, you can even manage your Writeboards from there. It’s totally free and you can create as many Writeboards as you like.
The code underneath is currently 908 lines, according to “rake stats”.
Ryan Raaum has just released a new version of Locomotive. It’s a collection of all the necessary dependencies for running Ruby on Rails on OS X and it ships with a nice controlling GUI for starting and stopping your applications.