Review of EnvyCast: Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast

Noel Rappin, Wednesday, October 29, 2008 @ 1:08 pm

Promotional image from envycasts.com

This week, Rails 2.2 Release Candidate one was loosed on an unsuspecting public. Friday, I'll post about the Rails 2.2 features that I'm most excited about working with. Today, I'm going to review Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer's screencast on new Rails features (and the associated PDF document by Carlos Brando and Carl Youngblood.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that we received a review copy of the screencast. In the interest of fuller disclosure, I'll add that had the email from them come even 10 minutes later than it did, I would have already bought it myself (I really was just about to go to their site and buy when I got the email) -- I really liked their first screencast on ActiveRecord. And I really liked this one, as well.

Like their first EnvyCast, the Rails 2.2 cast consists primarily of Gregg and Jason talking directly to the audience while code samples and diagrams appear in greenscreen behind them, with a lot of Keynote-style effects. They've raised the bar in terms of the visual presentation of screencast code. It's a lot more engaging then the typical screencast (including my own). We showed the video in a meeting for all our developers, which I don't think we could have done with a more traditional screencast. Gregg and Jason use the visuals to make the changes between Rails 2.1 and Rails 2.2 code extremely clear. The visual effects don't feel gimmicky or overdone, but nicely focus attention at the important parts of the new code and features.

In particular, the section on the new ETag features is outstanding, clearly explaining what the feature does and how you might use it. This is potentially one of the most important features in the new release. I knew very little about it going into watching the video, and now I am ready to start using the ETag feature in some of our projects.

The video is split into different sections for the different Rails sections with updates -- ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, ActionPack, ActionController, etc, and covers a lot of ground in 45 minutes. The PDF is even more detailed. I've just started working in Rails 2.2 and I learned about several features that I can't wait to try out.

Overall the two make an excellent guide to the latest and greatest in Rails 2.2. The screencast and PDF are well worth your time and money if and when you are planning on working in Rails 2.2.

Quick notes:

• I would have liked to have gotten more detail on the internationalization features, and to a slightly lesser extent more detail on the costs and benefits of thread safety.
• My favorite of the cheesy jokes was the one about the rejected method eighthiest, returning true if the object doesn't believe in the existence of Enumerable.
• I would have liked a little more acknowledgement that some of the changes were big and some were just little tweaks. I realize that you don't want to put all the big changes up front and then end with twenty minutes of little tweaky things. Still, the video feels a little scattershot at times, and a couple of "here are a few new little code-cleanup features" kind of would have minimized that.

agile ajax

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   [...] more from the original source:  Review of EnvyCast: Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast Share and [...]

   Pingback by Review of EnvyCast: Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast | 极客社区-新闻博客, Wednesday, October 29, 2008 @ 5:21 pm

2. 

   These guys are amazing, looking forward to more of their work. We considered giving them a call for some work we needed, lets see how things go.

   Comment by Carlos@webbynode, Thursday, October 30, 2008 @ 1:41 pm

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