Why I Built Ruby Off Rails

I built Ruby off Rails because ruby is awesome, and there are too many developers who don’t realize it. And the more I trained people, the more I found that: Developers who learn ruby first learn Rails Best. ###Announcing: Ruby Off Rails

That means, they pick up on concepts about instance variables, validations, how to create non-ActiveRecord classes, and most importantly: testing.

So I floated an idea, should we learn Ruby before we learn Rails? The answer from nearly everyone I spoke to was YES.

Enter: Ruby Off Rails – a collaborative learning environment where we master Ruby through Applied Learning. What does that mean?

• It means there’s not going to be a class on “Arrays” followed by one on “Syntax”. – We’ll build stuff together and learn by doing.
• It means that each class much have actionable code that someone could actually use in their life
• It means that you can watch the class live, or watch later. Much later.
• It means that students talk to each other, learn from each other, and see each other’s code through pull-requests on assignments

And most importantly, it means that we all code.

It’s a six week course designed for people who have programmed before. If you haven’t developed software, it’ll be ambitious, but watch the episodes a couple of times and you’ll get the hang of it. And you’ll learn TDD first! (you won’t be able to imagine a different way).

My true hope is this brings more people into the software development community and fosters coders teaching coders in a constructive and generally nice way.

1. Watch someone code
2. Code
3. Teach someone how to code

To Get Started

1. Visit RubyOffRails.com
2. Read through and sign up
3. We’ll being the Thursday after RailsConf (April 26, 2012)