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.

Having recently left a five-year stint at Adobe, I became accustomed to the world of expensive software. Now that I’m doing web development on my own, I’ve been amazed at the diversity and quality of free tools. I think this has some serious implications for the future of the software business, but that’s a topic for another post… right now, I just want to rave about a few of these great tools.

Firebug—A Must-Have Web Developer Tool

The Firebug extension for Firefox is a life-changing product for web developers. If you’re doing web development and you’re not already using it, go get it right now! Among many other capabilities, you can:

• Edit the HTML and CSS for a page you’re viewing and see the results instantly. This is very nice when you’re tweaking stuff to get it just right. It doesn’t save the files, so when you’re done you still have to go fix your source files, but it makes quick iterative experiments much easier.

• View the source for the page in a pane, either the HTML, or the CSS, or the JavaScript.

• Hover over an item on the page and see the corresponding HTML code highlighted, or vice versa, and see the cascade of styles applied to any element.

• See the timing for how the page was loaded, file by file.

• Debug the JavaScript code.

And lots more. Don’t work on web development without this.

IE Tab—Internet Explorer within Firefox

While we’re on the subject of Firefox extensions, I find IE Tab to be a great help. Browser rendering issues are a major nightmare in web development. Install the IE Tab Firefox extension, and with one click you can switch the rendering engine for any tab back and forth between IE and Firefox. My only wish is that it also would let me switch between IE 6 and IE 7.

RadRails—Ruby on Rails IDE

RadRails is a cross-platform Ruby on Rails development environment based on Eclipse. You get not only a nice Ruby editor, but also an integrated Subversion client and database browser. There’s integrated support for creating Mongrel servers for each app, and an integrated browser for viewing them. There’s also GUI access to the various Rails scripts, RI, and RDoc, though I’ve found this part less compelling.

Cygwin—Linux utilities for Windows

Cygwin is a tremendous collection of GNU tools ported to Windows. I know, if you have a “real” computer you don’t need this… but for those of us using Windows machines and also doing Linux server work, it’s a great convenience.

SQLyog—GUI for MySQL Database Management

SQLyog is a very nice GUI for managing MySQL databases. The free community edition unfortunately lacks some key features, like SSH tunneling, but it is still quite useful. And the Enterprise version is less than $50 for a single user (and even less for non-commercial use).

PuTTY—SSH Client for Windows

PuTTY is a Telnet and SSH client for Windows. An essential tool for working with remote Linux servers from Windows. Also part of the fully PuTTY package is Pageant, which enables you to use SSH keys on a Windows box for authentication with remote systems. (See my article on Using SSH Keys to Speed Login.)

WinSCP—SFTP Client for Windows

WinSCP is an open-source secure FTP client for Windows. This make it easy to securely browse remote filesystems.

JungleDisk—Cross-Platform Client for Amazon S3

JungleDisk turns Amazon’s S3 storage service into an easy-to-use virtual drive on a PC, Mac, or Linux box. This is a very inexpensive way to get easy remote storage. Great for backups or for moving files between systems.