Review Of Envy Cast's Ruby On Rails 2.2 Screencast And Pdf
Filed in Ruby. Delivered Wednesday November 05 2008
Recently I was given the opportunity to review the Ruby on Rails Envycast of Rails 2.2 from Envy Casts. I’ve long been a fan of the Rails Envy podcast. They give us solutions to Ruby and Rails problems as well as provoking deep thought about the Terminator. They even mocked me once. But most people will remember them as the jerks who encouraged everyone to use Ferret.
If you’re not familiar with the Rails Envy podcast, you should do yourself a favor and go listen to an episode first. Don’t worry, I’ll wait here…
To try to write about Rails screencasts without mentioning Railscasts or Peepcode is impossible, so I won’t try to act like the Rails Envy guys invented this space. What do they bring to the table? They’re in front of the camera, for one thing, and despite the fact that neither Gregg nor Jason look like that beautiful girl you knew in high school turned exotic dancer, seeing them makes the their interactions and gags all that much more enjoyable. Also, this video is a good bit longer than the Railscasts (44 minutes!) and this in-front-of-the-camera methodology keeps you from spacing out as I’m prone to do watching a Peepcode screencast.
The Ruby on Rails 2.2 Package is the second offering from Envy Casts. It is available as a 9 dollar video or a 9 dollar PDF, or as a 16 dollar combo. Take a moment to write a rails app illustrating how much you save by buying the combo*. Now scale it across 5 slices. Now consider the silence of a pebble.
Both items (surprise) cover the new features in Rails 2.2. If you haven’t watched the commit logs or kept up with Ryan Daigle’s What’s new in Edge Rails, you’ve missed some massive changes. This PDF and screencast will bring you up to speed quickly.
The screencast is conveniently broken into chapters (in the mov format, anyway), so, of course, is the PDF. Each segment is filled with new features and each new feature is approached in a “why would I care about this?” manner that cuts through the fluff and lets you easily see how the change is relevant.
The PDF covers the whole gambit of changes in Rails 2.2, while the video version covers a more interesting subset of the features. The content quality of the PDF is on par with the PDF’s you’d get from PeepCode, but the visual quality is not nearly as polished. Don’t misunderstand, the content is perfectly readable, it just lacks any splash of color to break up the monotonous black and white. Syntax highlighting and broken out sidebar boxes with key information might be useful in future Envy Cast PDFs.
There are a few awkward moments where they’re just left giggling at each other and some asides that go absolutely nowhere, but if you’re an fan of the podcast, you know that’s just part of the charm. Besides, who wants to read a boring list of changes with examples? Well, I do. But I also like a summary format that gives me an overview with fancy special effects that appeal to my short attention span. That’s why the bundle of the PDF and the screencast is an excellent choice. The grown up in me likes the dense and concise information in the PDF, but the kid in me likes the bleeped out profanity.
Did I learn? Yes. Did I laugh? Yes. Would I recommend the screencast? Yes, but that “yes” becomes “Absolutely!” if you are already a fan of the podcast. The PDF is vanilla enough that regardless of your tastes in humor, you should make it a purchase.
The Envy Cast guys didn’t invent the screencast, but they’ve made it enjoyable. If you want to learn without feeling like you’re working and become enlightened on Rails 2.2 rapidly, this is the best $16 you can spend.
*Bonus points to anyone who uses BackgrounDRb for the heavy math.