Will Henderson

Today was day one of the four day Rails crash-course that I am offering this week at Reed. I was really pleased with the turnout. Part of my goal with the class was to build a stronger network of web programmers at Reed, and by the results it seems like that goal is attainable. It was particularly nice that Greg Borenstein of grabb.it and a Reed alumn showed up to weigh in and help out with some of the pair programming activities. If you are interested in coming to remaining sessions, please do! They are today thru Friday (1/22), starting at 12 o’clock, in room 389 of the Library building complex.
For anyone that is interested, I will be posting the slides and audio for the class on this blog. I’ll start with today’s and just append the rest as updates. Had I known about the hot recording abilities introduced in Keynote ‘08, I surely would have used them today when I recorded the talk. Instead, I ended up manually syncing the slides with the audio in Garage Band, and it’s a little sloppy. Sorry about that – tomorrow will be better.

Day 1: Getting started with Ruby – in this class we learned about some of the basic features of Ruby. We learned about test-driven development, and dove right into TDD with some simple code and concepts. Update: Link fixed![20.9MB]

Day 2: Rails – in this class we talked about the structure of a rails app and looked at a sample rails app. I didn’t think to record the demo of the app and talk about the code – maybe next time with Snapz Pro? We also talked about some of the flaws in the sample and improved it by moving controller code to the model. See skinny controller, fat model. Finally, we started created a new class scheduling app (again, not in video – sorry!) which I will post a solution to tomorrow. [Video: 16.7MB] [Sample App (unimproved version): 124kb]

Day 3: Ride On – Today we improved our class scheduling app, using each improvement to talk about some features and ideas in Rails. First, we talked about migrations – including populating new table columns. We also talked about fixtures. Next, we talked about validators, and fixed bugs using TDD. We talked a bit about views. Finally, we talked about using svn for version control and collaboration.[11.8MB]

Day 4: REST – Today we talked about RESTful developement. The slides largely focus on the high-level concepts, with a bit of code to ground. Thanks to Greg after for his killer presentation of Grabb.it and talk about routes. Unfortantly, we didn’t get a recording of that. [Video: 16.7MB]

Thanks to all who showed up for the class! Thanks especially to Greg and Chris of Grabb.it for coming and sharing wisdom and code. Please send me feedback about my teaching skills and topics – either via email or anonymously as comments.