[ale] Good Ruby Training course in Atlanta area

[JD]

Start by joining http://www.meetup.com/atlantaruby/ . A few ruby-centric
companies sponsor the group and offer training. You might start there.

I attended free Ruby and Rails training from these guys over a 9 month period
with 2 hour sessions every other week.  We followed a book, but also spent time
on TDD, Git and RubyKoans http://www.rubykoans.com/ . The Koans use TDD to teach
most aspects of the Ruby Language.  It took me 3 weeks to work through the Koans
- about 30 hours of effort. I could be slow. I suppose if you both made
completion into a game, it could be quicker.

Those classes usually begin in Aug/Sept on Saturday mornings from 10a-noon.

There isn't an IDE for Ruby, though most RoR devs use OSX and Textmate. I use
Linux and Geany when I remember and don't use vim out of habit.  A few people
were diehard Windows people, but they had a very hard time from what I could
see.  The ruby and gem and rails tools are all CLI and everyone uses those.

We learned Rails with Ruby, since almost everyone learning Ruby wants it for
website development. I think this is a good method, since it lets complete
beginners begin to be productive almost immediately - though the code can be
hacked and isn't very secure at all. In a trusted environment, creating a webapp
to manage a single DB table is trivial.

I can't see anyone covering all the topics you want in 2 days.
It took over 1 session to get the environment up and running for most systems -
OSX and Linux included.  The best practice is NOT to use the OS package manager
for anything related to Ruby. Always use an independent version manager to keep
your development areas separate from whatever the OS uses - rbenv and rvm are
the leading tools for that.

Programming in Ruby is generally a joy, after I learned the odd way that strings
are handled which seems unlike any other language (over 20) that I've learned.

I wrote a blog article about setting up Ruby and Rails for Ubuntu 12.04 so that
all the dependencies would pre-exist before using rvm to build Ruby and Rails
for local use.
http://blog.jdpfu.com/2012/07/18/ruby-on-rails-environment-on-ubuntu-12-04
explains. As quickly as Ruby and Rails development changes, I suspect those
instructions are not valid any longer, though I still use the created
environment for coding.

I became interested in Ruby and Rails 6 yrs ago. During that time, Ruby and
Rails have been re-engineered completely 3 times - breaking older code and
forcing devs to learn a new way to interacting with Rails multiple times. I have
a number of Ruby, Rails and cookbooks that are next to worthless thanks to
recent changes in the tools again. These wholesale changes every 2-3 yrs is
confusing to non-experts. It just happened again with the Ruby 3.x release.

Of course, I'm only a beginner, so I could be completely wrong.

Hopefully, Alan or Allen will respond with more information. Both have spoken at
ALE-NW in 2013.

On 07/16/2013 04:08 PM, Narahari 'n' Savitha wrote:
> Friends:
> 
> I am looking for a good 1-day or may be 2-day course on Ruby for me and a
> colleague of mine in the Atlanta area.
> It should cover
> 
> a. basics of Ruby
> b. setup of Ruby
> c. Identify pitfalls or Gotchas
> d. debugging of Ruby
> e. Any IDE of Ruby
> f. Installing Ruby GEMS's
> g. Writing Ruby GEMS's
> h. Advanced topics of RUBY.
> i. Intro to Ruby on Rails
> j. Maint of Ruby and switching of versions etc.
> k.Rake etc.,
> 
> Any pointers would help  and idea on the ballpark of the cost involved would help.
>