During the dozen or so years I ran the Microprocessor Forum conference, I presented hundreds of seminars on microprocessors and PC technology. I enjoy teaching, and I’ve missed this aspect of that business.

Since I’ve been working with Ruby on Rails, I’ve been thinking about how it could be made easier for people to learn. I believe there are vast numbers of web designers and developers who would find Rails a very useful tool, and who could improve their productivity—and their satisfaction with what they’re producing and the process of producing it.

One thing led to another, and on February 20 and 21, my colleague Christopher Haupt and I will be presenting our first Ruby on Rails QuickStart seminar in San Francisco.

We’ve designed the seminar for web designers and developers with only minimal programming experience. We’re providing a pre-built site, which we’ll walk through during the seminar, that attendees can use as the basis of their own sites. We’re also very close to a deal with a hosting provider to offer free hosting for a month, so we can help attendees get their sites deployed before the seminar is over. We’ll provide each attendee with the NetBeans IDE, deployment scripts, and everything else they need to immediately build and deploy Ruby on Rails web sites.

I’m really looking forward to the seminar and hope some of my readers can join me there.

The early registration price of $695 is good until December 20. There’s details at the BuildingWebApps.com site.

Since I wrote my piece on Ruby on Rails books, three more books have come out. Here’s my initial take on them.

Rails Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

The Rails Cookbook, by Rob Orsini, is a great collection of simple recipes for getting things done with Ruby on Rails. It starts off with the basics, including getting Rails installed on various platforms, and setting up your development environment. Then there’s sections on Active Record, Action Controller, and Action View, each of which starts with simple recipes for the basics (like defining your tables with migrations and using the Rails console) and moves on to more advanced topics (such as modeling a threaded forum with acts_as_nested_set). The book has been fully updated for Rails 1.2.

Following this core material, there’s sections on:

• RESTful development
• Rails application testing
• JavaScript and Ajax
• Action Mailer
• Debugging
• Security
• Performance
• Hosting and deployment
• Plugins
• Graphics

Each of the recipes is short—typically just a page or two. You won’t find in-depth tutorials here. But you will find clear, simple explanations of how to accomplish a wide variety of common tasks with Rails. The book covers not just the core rails application material, but also how to use additional tools and plugins (such as Httperf for performance measurement, memcached for improving access times, and Firefox extensions for debugging).

This is a great book to have by your side after you’ve been through one or two of the core books and are building your first real application. More experienced developers will know much of the material in this book, but they’ll also find it valuable when looking for a quick start using a feature they haven’t tackled yet.

Ajax on Rails

While the Rails Cookbook is extremely broad and necessarily somewhat shallow, Ajax on Rails by Scott Raymond is narrow and deep. This book doesn’t try to cover Rails basics but focuses on using Ajax to create smoother user experiences for Rails applications. The first half of the book is a tutorial that starts with an explanation of what Ajax is, how it works under the covers, and how it is integrated into Rails. It then introduces the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries and the use of RJS templates. Following this are sections on Ajax usability, testing and debugging, security, and performance.

The second half of the book provides a complete reference to the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries and three example applications: a review quiz, a photo gallery, and a workgroup collaboration application. These complete examples (which you can download here) are very helpful to see how all the pieces come together to create a real application.

This is a book to get after you’ve been through a couple of the other books, built an application or two, and want to dive more deeply into using Ajax in your application.

Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy (Solutions)

Rails Solutions, subtitled Ruby on Rails Made Easy, lives up to its subtitle. Written by Justin Williams, this is an introductory book aimed at web designers, not experienced developers. If you have a software development background, you can skip this book. But if you’re a web designer who maybe has done a little PHP and wants to quickly understand what Rails is all about, this book is a good start.

This book is a much shorter, and easier, read than the classic introductory book, Agile Web Development with Rails, or the excellent Ruby for Rails it won’t take you nearly as far, but it is a quicker and gentler introduction. You’ll learn enough to build a simple Rails application, and then you can move on to the other books to deepen your knowledge.

The main competitor to this book is Beginning Ruby on Rails. That book provides somewhat more tutorial content about programming concepts, and therefore doesn’t move you quite as quickly through building an application.

Last week I spent three days at the Rails Edge conference. This was a great event for learning about the latest developments in Ruby on Rails and meeting with some of the leading folks from that community.

This three-day event was produced by Pragmatic Studio, which is sort of a sister company to Pragmatic Bookshelf that publishes several of the key Rails books. The lead presenters at the conference were Dave Thomas, coauthor of Agile Web Development with Rails as well as Programming Ruby, and Mike Clark, who is the producer of the event, an active Rails developer, coauthor of Agile Web Development with Rails, and author of Pragmatic Project Automation and other Java books. Other presenters included:

• Chad Fowler, author of Rails Recipies, coauthor of Programming Ruby, cofounder of Ruby Central
• James Duncan Davidson, perhaps best known as the author of Tomcat and an expert on deploying Rails apps
• Justin Gehtland and Stuart Halloway of Relevance LLC, consultants who have been very active in the Rails community and have a lot of experience deploying enterprise applications
• Marcel Molina, Jr. from 37Signals, who is part of the Rails core team
• Bruce Williams, a designer/developer working on a very large Rails application
• Jim Weirich, author of the Rake utility and an expert in Ruby programming

If the people in this room couldn’t answer your questions on Ruby on Rails, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who could. With the unusual format of single-track, one-hour presentations separated by half-hour breaks, there was plenty of time to talk with the speakers and the roughly 100 participants. Some of the talks were entirely understandable by relative newbies such as myself, while others were clearly aimed at folks with substantial experience building Rails applications and programming in Ruby.

This event was a striking contrast to the previous week’s Web 2.0 Summit. This was obviously a much smaller and much more technical event, but what struck me was the center of interest: the Web 2.0 Summit was about, first and foremost, money, whereas the Rails Edge event was about ideas and craftsmanship. Both were interesting, but they’re about as different as two events could be.

In talking with folks in the evening and during the breaks; many of them seemed to fall into one of two camps:

• People actively developing with Rails as a corporate employee or as a consultant
• People who are using Java at their day job and building a web app with Rails at night, hoping to get to the point where they can quit their day job

More than once, speakers and participants pointed out that building a web application in Java as a spare-time activity wasn’t very likely; the fact that Rails makes it so much easier, and more fun, is encouraging and enabling a lot of niche applications to be built, often as hobbies that might someday create meaningful revenue. While the folks at the Web 2.0 Summit were more likely to be involved with heavily funded, well-staffed efforts going after big wins, the Rails Edge revealed a variety of small, enthusiast-created apps with more modest ambitions (like ShowerinaBox). I’d bet this latter source could be just as important to the future of the Web as the big efforts.

If you missed this event and wish that you hadn’t, there’s another chance: it will be repeated in Reston, VA on January 25-27. You can register here.

If you’re early in your Rails learning, then I’d recommend the Rails Studio instead; I’m planning to attend this on February 12-14 in Bellevue, Washington. It’s also being offered in January in Minneapolis.