RailsCast is an amazing service and I don't know if I could've ever learned Rails (and the RoR ecosystem) without it. Definitely a service worth paying for. I'm glad he's keeping the free episodes because it would be a shame if newbies shied away from trying it out because episodes were no longer free.
I just subscribed to show support, too. There's no doubt that I'll get $9 worth of benefit out of the Pro screencasts and updates.
The amazing thing about RailsCasts are how great they are at helping developers through sticking points. I can't count the number of times that I've gone straight to RailsCasts and looked for a tutorial on a particular gem or how to accomplish a certain task (nested forms, multiple edit, etc). It sure beats the alternative of Googling and Stack Overflowing for 2-3x the time.
And... How often have you watched a railsast on a particular subject, only to get an a-ha moment on something only marginally related? Happens to me every other episode.
And how much have I not had to bill my clients for the incredible functionality of cancan (and to a lesser degree nested_form). cancan (https://github.com/ryanb/cancan) is probably the most valuable gem I install in every Rails project.
I combo devise+cancan+carrierwave+activescaffold => insta-webapps. The activescaffold cancan bridge I wrote chains the cancan rules throughout the app, epic instant gratification.
Thanks for all your hard work over the years. It is truly, truly appreciated. I've watched so many Railscasts while learning Rails that my wife rolls her eyes when she hears the intro chimes.
Agreed or at least offer it as an option so we can throw Eifion a bone. Asciicasts is great when you prefer to read (e.g. on a Kindle during the daily commute).
Now this is a service from someone who contributed to community a lot. Unlike that textmate debacle where people would pledge money for nothing, this is the real deal and it is very reasonable. I could see how this could cost more, but I can see how with this he will probably get good following, provide for Ryan resources to continue his work.
I will be happy to subscribe to such service and to add, I would subscribe just to say thanks for years of awesome content.
I'm glad to see an outstandingly helpful member of the rails community earn income from what has been a mostly altruistic task that must take a lot of time every week.
They might be awesome, but unless you scroll down to the very bottom and notice a small note, you would think this a free service. I felt like being deceived and immediately closed the website after signup confirmation, when asked to enter credit card details.
I may have paid if I knew it upfront, but this kind of approach is so annoying, that I would prefer not to pay just because of that.
I think hasanove is talking about destroyallsoftware.com, which is a pay site, but it's hard to tell from the landing page.
I also think it's the response (i.e., railscasts.com/pro) that is being called awesome in the root comment, even though the wording is somewhat ambiguous.
I'll definitely give this service a try. Does anyone know of any other premium rails screencast sites? I recall a link to a funny rails article on HN about a month ago that was created by a guy who does premium rails cast for $9/mo (the site has a really dark background). Wasn't able to dig that up after a weekend of searching.
RailsCasts gets recommended to beginners a lot but every time I go there I'm kind of overwhelmed and have no idea where to start. The archives go back to 2007 so starting at the beginning seems likely to cover outdated subjects now. On the front page I see Draper, Spork, Sorcery, Foreman, Pry... none of this means much to me.
Any suggestions on how to attack this for a relative newbie to rails?
I don't think Railscasts is a great introduction to Rails, but certainly a resource that beginners can use. What I did was to work my way through the first parts of "Agile Web Development with Rails" to understand the structure of rails, then just try to build stuff.
Whenever I had a question or felt somebody should have automated whatever I was doing, I would search Railscasts. I needed PDF generation, so I would search for PDF and compare my options.
When you have some experience with current Rails (say, 3.1), actively following new Railscasts is interesting to see what changed in 3.2, 3.3, 4.0, ...
I'm so glad to see the outpouring of users who are downright happy to pay for this service. Ryan: you should add a payment option that lets people pay more than $9 per month. Let us specify the amount. I'd gladly pay more if it meant you could spend more time producing content.
For some reason, RailsCasts.com is not loading up at all for me. Am I the only one seeing this?
If it helps, I am using Chrome 14.0.835.186 on a Mac OSX Snow Leopard.
I wonder why Ryan is not blocking access to the source code for pro screencasts on github. Other pro screencasts such as peepcode protect the source code as well.
I want to keep the experience the same as possible with the free episodes without losing any conveniences such as browsing the source code. If one finds the source code interesting, hopefully he will subscribe to watch the video too.
Who says I haven't? All I'm saying is I wish he'd charge more. He would get more money overall from the people who would not have thought to do such a thing :)
Rails 3.x jumped the shark. It is getting too complicated for anyone new to come on easily. This is the reason that Scala, Clojure, Haskell, etc. will fail, too- complexity. I'm not a PhP guy, but it isn't hard to see why it is still wildly popular. Make it easy enough, and fun to use, and it will take hold.
So while he may make money on Rails geeks that continue on and with those that want to learn, there are fewer that are coming on and will come on now then there were.
If you like Rails, listen to Ryan. I've been doing RoR a while and really, really appreciate the Railscasts (and the Asciicasts of his Railscasts- thanks Eifion!). But if you are looking for a long-term framework to stand by, keep looking.
From DHH: "Here's the Rails gospel: Promote good ideas and technologies. See Ajax, REST, Atom, testing. Rails is a curated set of tech choices."
I think Rails 3.x continues to live up to that gospel. You're right that Rails 3 is more complicated than Rails 2 (although it is also much cleaner than Rails 2), which was more complicated than Rails 1. However, the world of web development is also steadily more complicated. There was a time when knowing how to create a webpage with CSS put you at the forefront of web technology. That time is long gone.
Developers using many major frameworks/languages don't need to quote a single or even a set of "gods" of the framework/language to back up their point. This is one of the problems in Rails, imo. Everything is still about following celebrities like sheep. That is a bad road, my friend. I would much rather live in the midst of a thriving city or within a growing town that had promise than within a hippie cult commune (regardless of its size or the quality of its food or company). Think for yourself. What would you like to use, and why?
At least internally Rails 3 is a lot less crufty and hackish than Rails 2. If you ever tried writing your own plugins and such to deal with certain internals there is a lot to appreciate about Rails 3.
From a general use perspective, Rails has always been designed with a focus on intuitiveness and trying to eschew unnecessary configuration. Whether it succeeds on both fronts is a matter of opinion, but considering the types of configuration options it provides I think the team has done a pretty good job.
Rails is a pre-built web app architecture. Of course it is always going to be quicker and have less of a learning curve to just throw together your own simple app architecture from scratch. But if the app you're building isn't trivial, in most cases it's going to save you a lot of time (in not reinventing the wheel or getting caught in common pitfalls) to go with the prebuilt time-tested community-supported architecture.
I wouldn't think Rails compares too poorly to the PHP MVC frameworks. Sure if you're building just a simple sort of website with maybe a few forms go with framework-free PHP, but for more complex but somewhat standard web apps if you forgo the framework (for Ruby, PHP, etc.) it is usually a mistake.
I jumped straight in at rails 3 without any real issues and I'm a relatively inexperienced developer. There's a wealth of fantastic resources out their for learning Rails 3 of which Railscasts is only a small part. Contrast that to Django (which I learned before Rails) and all the books are now over two years old and only cover Django 1.1 at the latest.
I think at any point in time, the answer is the one that is a combination of the following (1) it makes the most sense to you, (2) it is maintainable/it is widely used (or has the potential to be, if you are willing to take the risk of something becoming quickly obsolete and impractical to maintain or impossible to find resources that will work on it), (3) it is simple, (4) it is flexible, and (5) it is potentially scalible.
There are a number of frameworks that meet those requirements now, including Rails. My point was that Rails has a real problem now in that it is a framework that fewer want to spend the time to learn, in my opinion and the opinion of others that make their living writing Rails apps. I see very smart people and people I work with (not necessarily, but sometimes mutually exclusive ;) ) promoting technology these days that doesn't fit the requirements I stated above for a framework/language/tool that will serve the test of time. That bothers me.
If you are really looking for a suggestion, I say go to the following URL and start comparing frameworks. This will at least help give some indication of usage. Then go to the forums, mailing lists, etc. and see whether things are getting more or less active over time:
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends
