I am a big proponent of the learn by doing paradigm and the Rails Best Practices course from the guys at Code School is a really neat way to get familiar with rails development. I really enjoyed the light-hearted yet content packed screencasts that have the usual awesome production values from Envy Labs. I was even more impressed with the exercises at the end of the sections. The slick interface was a joy to use but there were several times where the answer I provided, while “correct”, was not quite what the exercise was looking for and it was hard to tell why. Even though I was familiar with most of the topics covered there were several things I learned that have become a part of my everyday toolkit. I was unaware of the .try and .present? methods and they have helped in making my code more readable. I also learned a lot about the rails counter cache and the subtleties in the methods for getting the size of a collection. Overall I enjoyed working through the sections and I am very excited to see what Code School is able to do with their interactive platform!!

• Colin Alstad Jack Russell Software