If you are anything like me visual and hands-on experience are two of the most effect methods of learning. Code School has taken these teaching methods a step further to offers a new intuitive and interactive learning experience through the use of video, slides, and chapter quizes that utilize the in-browser editor. I have taken both of the courses that are currently being offered: Rails for Zombies and Rails Best Practices. Both courses have proven to be quite useful for me seeing as though I am still quite new to Ruby on Rails and coding in general. Rails for Zombies is an awesome low-level ROR overview great for newbs or as a refresher, whereas Rails Best Practices focuses more on refactoring of code, and you guessed it, ‘Best Practices’.

My most recent Code School experience was taking the ‘Rails Best Practice’ course, which I must say is a very useful and well put together course. Throughout the course, I was constantly having ‘A-ha’ moments learning cool new tricks, which I guess is the point. The content layout of the course was well laid out and each lesson was well organized with common themed material. As is the flow of the other Code School lessons, each lesson is followed by some useful hands-on quizes that review that lessons’ material.

In general, the lesson quizes are awesome in that you are able to get in some hand-on experience and utilize new tricks you may have just learned. The convenience of being able to go from the lesson to the lesson quizes and the editor and begin writing code all in your browser window is awesome!! My only aversion being that many of the error logs in the editor we not very helpful in debugging at all. A few times I found myself spending way too much time trying to figure out what was wrong with my code only to find out I had any extra space somewhere.

In all, I found ‘Rails Best Practice to be a great learning tool filled with great information that is delivered through captivating multimedia videos and slides.

• Russell Niller

Jack Russell Software