Tell HN: Rails screencasts. | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Rails screencasts.

85 pointshajrice49 comments

I've been thinking of creating a series of rails screen casts focused on teaching you how to build an application. I really love RailsCasts, but my focus would be to basically be teaching you by creating an application in every season. To give you a glimpse it'd be something like sitting next to a programmer building a rails application.

Basically, season one would be something like building a really powerful blog application, season two, a SaaS app with rails, etc...

Interested? Upvote or comment. I'm trying to figure out how many people would be interested...

Thanks!

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I hate screencasts. They force you to sit around watching, don't let you cut and paste or easily skim the content, and of course aren't like sitting next to someone in that you can't stop the guy talking and ask him a question.

On the other hand, I'd love to see some good Rails articles.

Screencasts can be really annoying, and I prefer the asciicast versions of RyanB's casts. However, I still watch the videos, usually when I have some downtime and want to 'work' with someone else. For me, I do all my Rails dev solo, so all I have is vim, irc, and mailing lists.

Screencasts are fun.

I agree. Screencasts are really fun, especially if the lecturer isn't boring and monotone!

I noticed something while talking with people on the subject - it's not only about the lecturer, at all.

It's just a matter of taste: some people really hate screencasts, while other really love them (see on stackoverflow.com for debates on that topic!).

You won't be able to please both (unless you have something similar to asciicasts maybe ?)

Thanks to the power of mechanicalturk, I think I could pay them to transcript the videos.

Interesting idea. I'd be curious to hear if they turn out a good transcript or whether their lack of understanding of the subject material makes it garbled. I guess with enough people doing it, you can check out the most common transcriptions and go with those...

that's how mixergy does it

If you are to do a truly high quality screencast, you would need to have a script (and code) written ahead of time anyway. Otherwise you would fall afoul of the other complaints in this thread -- overly long, rambling and unfocused.

Most commercial screencasts ship with the source code. It's subjective, though, because many people are visual learners.

For example, I had dabbled into jQuery through the docs and tutorials. However, it wasn't until I got a copy of Peepcode's jQuery screencast that I really got hold of it.

That's interesting. Some people find it hard to learn by watching a screen cast. How much value do you see in these rails screencasts ?

I don't think videos are the best way to learn specifics, but in terms of seeing an overview or "connecting the dots" they work well. Ultimately, the real learning comes from the doing and by looking up stuff from various sources. To get the broad view and idea behind a topic, though, a well produced video can't be beaten.

Given that, I doubt these screencasts would be that interesting if they went into every little detail - but if they gave the viewer enough confidence and interest to know what to look up elsewhere, it could work out well.

Screencasts are one of the things that attracted me to Ruby in the first place. A few years ago I was debating between Ruby and few other languages and, to me, the best part of the language is the community around it. One part that separates it from others is the quality and variety of educational material. Well written articles, screencasts and podcasts are all consistently good.

If you think screencasting will be fun -- go for it. If you put the time and effort into making a quality product I would watch it.

This is why RailsCasts is awesome. Every article links to ASCIICasts, which has the exact same content, just written down.

While I prefer written content eventually, screencasts can be a great way to get the motivation and be forced to see the introductory stuff on a topic. A long article is easy to ignore but if you dedicate 10 minutes to a well produced screencast, it can certainly whet the appetite to go out and learn more.

The hard part about screencasts and interviews is keeping the viewers attention span. We've seen on Mixergy how the viewer count drops over time -- from Andrew's graphs he makes public. I'd be interested in checking out some Rails screencasts, but only if they're well edited.

How much of what you build is going to branch back out into front-end code? HTML/CSS/JS

Do you plan on making the code readily available to follow along? If so, how are you planning on doing this? Might be an idea to try using a dvcs. Assuming you plan it well enough, you could potentially have a bash script which will checkout your code at each video point for the user.

I agree, attention span is something that's really hard to maintain.

Front end coding: Very little, I'd use the nifty_layouts. No reason to spend time when the likelihood of you using the exact same design is very little.

In terms of editing, that's very time consuming. This raises the question, would you be willing to pay for that at a "fair price"?

About fair price: I'll reach you by IM, several things to share with you on that topic.

> only if they're well edited

I second that - an edited and concise screencast is worth much more than an non-edited one. PeepCode are a very good example about how to do this right!

I'd limit every episode by 5 minutes. www.screenr.com is awesome software. I haven't found anything that fits my needs apart from it(I'm on Ubuntu)

+1 for limit to 5 minutes (or concise anyway :-).

About ubuntu - maybe this could be helpful: ?

http://remi.org/2009/04/16/how-i-record-my-screencasts

Thanks for responding with a useful link. Unfortunately, recordMyScreen is a bit ... "slow" in terms of video quality.

I think I'll stick with screenr, it limits me to 5 minutes per video anyway!

I really like peepcode:

peepcode.com

I'm learning rails at the moment and I find it quite useful - especially from the very start of my immersion into the world of rails. You may get 'inspiration' from these guys ;-)

I agree, peepcode is executing their videos really well.

+1 for peepcode.

Just watch objective-c/iphone series once and you'll be writing iphone apps right away.

http://www.railstutorial.org/

This is a book teaches you how to build a Twitter like applications. According to the site it will eventually be accompanied by screencasts.

I do like screencast though. I say go for it but teach folks how to build a different application than the one in Rails Tutorial.

I know I'm not alone when I say that Ryan Bates' railscasts.com has saved me countless hours of frustration, and expanded my vision of what Rails is capable of doing. Few presenters can match Ryan's clear, pleasant style. In terms of free offerings, there isn't likely to be anything more comprehensive and professional.

I'd think you would have to look at it like writing a book, except with the chapters being in video instead of text. I think trying to approach it as a series of RailsCasts would not cater to the type of people who want such a structured learning system. One of RailsCasts best benefits is that you learn on your own terms, which is the opposite of what you are going for it sounds like.

There are many different learning styles and some people like to see rather than read so I think it has potential. You may check out LearnVisualStudio.net as they have been selling videos for years, including videos that go from nothing to building a full featured application.

Good luck in your venture - the more ways people can learn rails, the more it will attract new developers and grow the ecosystem.

I love the idea of turning this into a book, yet the problem with a book is that due to how fast rails moves, the actual content would eventually become outdated.

Agreed - most books become outdated by the time they reach the bookshelves.

I'm saying more of a book approach than a screencast approach. Most books start at the ground up, with each chapter building on the previous, while many screencasts tend to be independent of previous episodes.

I usually don't care for screencasts about technology because they often treat the viewer like a dumbass. For example, they'll spend 30 seconds introducing themselves or explaining what they're going to do even if it's super trivial. I would suggest trying to be as concise, but still be as digestible as possible. If your screencast is actually useful and 5 minutes long, I might watch it again. If it's 10 minutes and just okay, no way am I going back to it.

Hope this helps. I'm also interested. I am learning ruby now and soon I want to start learning rails.

I think it's a very good idea, both based on my own opinion and on feedback I got on http://www.learnivore.com which I run.

Would you focus on Rails 3 directly ?

One remark: I would take care of sound quality and would not use the integrated microphone, but an external (even cheap, like head-set) one.

Feel free to contact me by mail (see profile) if you want to chat about your idea!

Rails 3: Well, it's a huge shift from the previous rails version, so, yes.

Regarding sound quality, yeah, I'm using a headset.

Btw. I added you on GChat.

One remark: I would take care of sound quality and would not use the integrated microphone, but an external (even cheap, like head-set) one.

Right on. Crappy sound has made me turn off many a screencast (mostly informal ones, sure). The worst is when you can hear both the keyboard and a MacBook Pro fan whirring up because it can only just about deal with recording the screencast ;-)

A USB microphone like a Blue Snowball or one of the Samson things only costs $100 or so. Though even with a headset, if you know what you're doing you can run some EQ to make it sound bearable (Garageband is even good for this if you have nothing better).

I say, start with the SaaS app. The blog thing has been done to death. Also, can you do a non screencast blog post of it as you go?

For anyone who wants a non screencast Rails tutorial, BTW, this one came out recently: http://www.railstutorial.org/

I highly suggest you also talk about the WHY a great deal. I buy quite a few screencasts and knowing your audience is a hugely important thing.

Some of us don't have the programming background to leverage and the why of where you are putting code, why it is better than shoving everything into the view etc is important. 5 minutes would be too short I think for most useful learning exercises. I agree peeepcode does this quite well.

An example screencast that I would purchase would be using authlogic and then adding and extending functionality to fit your needs. Adding lost password functions, user levels, etc. That would give a nice complete view of a very commonly used item and useful across any project you are going to create on your own.

I would definitely be interested in watching this, and I think the amount of feedback in this thread shows that others would be too. If you look at the Feedback section of railscasts.com you'll see that the second most popular request is for Ryan Bates to "Build an entire application over a series of screencasts" and it has almost 1500 votes.

Others have already pointed this out, but it's important to keep the screencasts short and try to split each project up into smaller videos by topic. I like screencasts, but there's nothing worse than sitting through an hour long video for 10 minutes of content. It's a waste of time, and it makes it difficult to find the valuable content again later without re-watching the whole video.

I like it. A good marketing strategy, btw, would be to release the first one for free (the blog one), because there are many blog-in-rails tutorials and screencasts. This way people would see the alleged quality of your screencasts and be incited to buy the others.

Yes. Teaching others can definitely be a good marketing strategy. I think that Obie Fernandez made HashRocket really popular through his book, "The Rails Way"

I like the idea. I would love to see a somewhat complex app written using Rails. How long do you think each screencast would be?

I agree with some of the other commentators that many like reading vs. watching a screencast (and it does not help that you can't copy-paste code), so perhaps you might consider putting the code out there.

Thanks for the feedback. Every episode would be limited to 5 minutes.

The code would be publicly available via github.

If you're looking for more examples for comparison, tekpub.com has really good screencasts, including a series for Rails.

If you have to count on others this much to get enough motivation to get started you'll most likely get nowhere. I'd advise to be more self-reliant. This goes for all projects of appreciable complexity.

If you've got an itch, scratch it. If you're thinking about it, and you keep thinking about it, and it won't let you go, then do it.

I think this is a great idea. It sounds like I would get a lot out of something like this.

There's a really good learning ruby on rails DVD from lynda.com

sounds great

Thanks. Do you have any suggestions, I'd really appreciate hearing your opinion on this.

Any material that gives a holistic view (that will be an aid to n00bs like me) or exploring the limitations of rails while building real world applications would be interesting. Where is it hard to work idiomatically within the framework of rails and what are the workarounds... just some thoughts

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