Posts tagged codeschool

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

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