Ryan Bates launches RailsCasts Pro
railscasts.com
railscasts.com
The amazing thing about RailsCasts are how great they are at helping developers through sticking points. I can't count the number of times that I've gone straight to RailsCasts and looked for a tutorial on a particular gem or how to accomplish a certain task (nested forms, multiple edit, etc). It sure beats the alternative of Googling and Stack Overflowing for 2-3x the time.
I wouldn't have been able to learn Rails as quickly as I did without Railscasts.
$9 is really a steal :)
Railscasts are amazing - I always felt I should be paying something for them
I will be happy to subscribe to such service and to add, I would subscribe just to say thanks for years of awesome content.
I may have paid if I knew it upfront, but this kind of approach is so annoying, that I would prefer not to pay just because of that.
I also think it's the response (i.e., railscasts.com/pro) that is being called awesome in the root comment, even though the wording is somewhat ambiguous.
Any suggestions on how to attack this for a relative newbie to rails?
Whenever I had a question or felt somebody should have automated whatever I was doing, I would search Railscasts. I needed PDF generation, so I would search for PDF and compare my options.
When you have some experience with current Rails (say, 3.1), actively following new Railscasts is interesting to see what changed in 3.2, 3.3, 4.0, ...
Anyways, I'm going to subscribe not just for future episodes but for all those episodes from which I've gained immense knowledge.
So will we be seeing an episode or maybe an advanced episode on how Ryan set up reoccurring billing for Railscasts?
In fact, only slight modification needed to make it work with Rails. But, if you are interested, I can write a blog post about it.
But here in China, many young students will still think it is too much...bad bad bad, anybody can do a less pro one, and make it free?
Also, PayPal support will be coming soon which should make signup easier for international.
So while he may make money on Rails geeks that continue on and with those that want to learn, there are fewer that are coming on and will come on now then there were.
If you like Rails, listen to Ryan. I've been doing RoR a while and really, really appreciate the Railscasts (and the Asciicasts of his Railscasts- thanks Eifion!). But if you are looking for a long-term framework to stand by, keep looking.
I think Rails 3.x continues to live up to that gospel. You're right that Rails 3 is more complicated than Rails 2 (although it is also much cleaner than Rails 2), which was more complicated than Rails 1. However, the world of web development is also steadily more complicated. There was a time when knowing how to create a webpage with CSS put you at the forefront of web technology. That time is long gone.
There are a number of frameworks that meet those requirements now, including Rails. My point was that Rails has a real problem now in that it is a framework that fewer want to spend the time to learn, in my opinion and the opinion of others that make their living writing Rails apps. I see very smart people and people I work with (not necessarily, but sometimes mutually exclusive ;) ) promoting technology these days that doesn't fit the requirements I stated above for a framework/language/tool that will serve the test of time. That bothers me.
If you are really looking for a suggestion, I say go to the following URL and start comparing frameworks. This will at least help give some indication of usage. Then go to the forums, mailing lists, etc. and see whether things are getting more or less active over time: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends
From a general use perspective, Rails has always been designed with a focus on intuitiveness and trying to eschew unnecessary configuration. Whether it succeeds on both fronts is a matter of opinion, but considering the types of configuration options it provides I think the team has done a pretty good job.
Rails is a pre-built web app architecture. Of course it is always going to be quicker and have less of a learning curve to just throw together your own simple app architecture from scratch. But if the app you're building isn't trivial, in most cases it's going to save you a lot of time (in not reinventing the wheel or getting caught in common pitfalls) to go with the prebuilt time-tested community-supported architecture.
I wouldn't think Rails compares too poorly to the PHP MVC frameworks. Sure if you're building just a simple sort of website with maybe a few forms go with framework-free PHP, but for more complex but somewhat standard web apps if you forgo the framework (for Ruby, PHP, etc.) it is usually a mistake.