Stanford Open Classroom - Ruby on Rails Web Apps | Hacker News Reader

Stanford Open Classroom - Ruby on Rails Web Apps

openclassroom.stanford.edu

160 pointsstupandaus15 comments

The coursework is for Rails 2.3. Things have significantly changed in the Rails framework. A lot of great info on web applications in general, including security, javascript, css, and AJAX, though.

Also, something that might escape the attention of our younger hackers: the class instructor is THE John Ousterhout, creator of Tcl and Tk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ousterhout

Looking through a few of these, I really wish they would put some more effort into the sound quality. One of the lectures on forms was so warped, like they had hooked the mic up to a guitar amp.

The phrase "quality over quantity" really comes to mind. Lynda makes great tutorials, and TED talks are just amazing (presentation wise). The Stanford tutorials may have great content, but then again so do books...if you're going to do videos, at least do it right. There is little point publishing just for the sake of publishing.

Though I guess these lecture recordings are the equivalent of alpha software...so I might just have somewhat high expectations.

It's also a free resource so the phrase "you get what you pay for" comes to mind.

That's a terrible reason for not getting the sound right. Khan Academy is free, and they have good sound.

To the courses defense, It's in an open classroom environment, while Khan Academy is Khan sitting at his computer, so it's much easier to get the sound right.

This was a very low-key offering. These initial experiments led to the AI, DB, and ML classes that are being offered for free, all of which have great production quality. Even Stanford professors have to approach problems incrementally.

When I took cs142, it was actually a web security class. It seems that the last few weeks of the class will still be devoted to security. The introduction to Rails was done solely to get students to implement safeguards against the attacks they had learned earlier in the course. The class appears to take the reverse route now, possibly due to student feedback.

Actually, CS 241 is now the web security class. This, from what I was told, was a totally different class that was focused more on web development as a whole, rather than web security.

There is another set of full length 'intro to C and computing' lectures by Richard Buckland of UNSW. He's a fantastic and very engaging teacher. Videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/UNSWelearning#g/c/6B940F08B9773B...

There's a growing number of courses, tutorials, etc online. Does anyone know any mechanism for meeting and collaborating with others who are planning on working through the same courses/tutorials. I am pretty individualistic when it comes to learning, but even I would find collaborative learning helpful at times.

Maybe a place to find partners, online or offline "study groups" etc. Maybe meetup.com would be useful, but for some reason I don't see that working. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

Crash course on web apps for people of all skill levels, partitioned into nice snack-size lectures. This is a great resource. Nice find.

EDIT: Correction. It seems some of the shorter lectures are simply incomplete. =/

There are tons of great Rails tutorials out there, so the focus on security is a great and important one. But anyone know any written Intro to Security for Rails tutorials?

The one provided by Ruby on Rails covers quite a few basics: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html

Not really text, but the text version of Railscast #178: http://asciicasts.com/episodes/178-seven-security-tips

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html looks pretty good. I'm coming back to rails after a few years and I honestly can't believe how good the official guides are. Clearly written & brilliantly organized, I wish all frameworks were this well documented.

Yes. Thank you for posting. This is epic.

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