I spent the earlier part of this week at Pragmatic’s Rails Studio, an intensive three-day Ruby on Rails training. This one was in Seattle; they are offered periodically at various locations around the country. (There’s not another one announced yet, but they’ll be posting a new schedule shortly; check their web site.)

Overall, I found this to be very worthwhile. It would have been a lot more valuable, however, if I could have gone a couple months ago, as I’ve spent the past two months building a couple small Rails sites, figuring things out as I went along. So a lot of it was review for me—something like 80% of the first day, 60% of the second day, and 50% of the third day. Nevertheless, it was very helpful in filling some gaps in my knowledge. I picked up quite a few tips, and perhaps most important, it gave me confidence that I’m on the right track and moving along pretty well. The presentations went well beyond the facts to explain the best way to approach things, why certain things in Rails work the way they do, and other useful bits of perspective that come from long experience.

World-Class Instruction

The instructors are Dave Thomas, the primary author of Agile Web Development with Rails and the proprietor of the Pragmatic Programmers publishing house, and Mike Clark, also an author and an active developer, and the head of Pragmatic Studio, a separate training company that shares part of the brand with Dave’s company. Both are outstanding instructors with deep expertise in the subjects covered. Chad Fowler was also there helping out, and he surely knows as much about Ruby as anyone in the U.S.

Dave Thomas

Mike Clark

The format of the Studio is an hour or two of lecture, followed by half an hour or so of programming on your own (you need to bring your own laptop). It’s an effective format, since you really don’t know if you understand something until you try to do it. Mike and Dave alternate speaking, providing different perspectives and variety in style.

The attendees were surprisingly diverse. There was certainly a local Seattle-area contingent, but there were also some who had traveled a long way. I went out to dinner one night and in our group there was one person from Alaska, one from Paris, and one from Mexico City. Some of the attendees were building Rails sites for their days jobs, while many were working in other technologies and seeking to move into Rails, either with their current employer, on their own, or with a new employer TBD.

Is This the Right Seminar for You?

If you’re looking for a jump-start in Rails development and are just getting started, I highly recommend the Rails Studio. If you’ve already done some Rails development, though, it’s a tougher call.

If you’re comfortable with the basics of the MVC separation, using migrations, creating and using associations, performing validation, and using views and layouts, this seminar will be mostly review. It covers the basics of AJAX with RJS templates and simple Scriptaculous effects, but nothing complex. One part that was most useful to me was the coverage of unit, functional, and integration tests, although the depth of coverage here too was necessarily limited.

If this Studio sounds like it would be mostly review for you, consider the Advanced Rails Studio (next offered in April in Dallas).

I’ll be adding a series of posts during the next couple days about some of the things I learned at the Studio.