Launch of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts (3rd edition)

tl;dr: The 3rd Edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencast series is now available. Designed to complement the book Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails, the Rails Tutorial screencast series consists of 12 lessons (one for each chapter of the book), totaling more than 15 hours of HD video. A teaser trailer and a full sample lesson are also available. As part of the launch, you can get 20% off all Rails Tutorial products through the end of this week (Friday, December 5).

Discuss this post at Hacker News

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the 3rd Edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts. The new screencasts have been recorded from scratch and are designed to get you started with professional-grade Ruby on Rails web development as fast as possible. Based on the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book, the 3rd edition screencasts should be especially useful for Rails Tutorial readers who want to see exactly how to develop (or at least how I develop) Ruby on Rails web apps.

The 3rd edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencast series has been extensively revised from previous versions. Here are some of the changes:

1. Use of a standard integrated development environment in the cloud, with a pre-configured workspace specifically tailored to the needs of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial. Use of the custom Cloud9 IDE environment allows you to see exactly how to follow every step of the Rails Tutorial using the same development environment shown in the screencasts.

2. 100% default stack. The 3rd edition of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial screencasts uses the default Rails choices for all relevant technologies, thereby substantially reducing the configuration necessary to get started.

3. Lighter-weight testing approach. The 3rd edition still covers test-driven development (TDD), but uses it more sparingly and judiciously. The more forbidding “wall of tests” sections have been eliminated, with concise and expressive integration tests (usually written after the application code) taking their place.

4. A fully revised lesson on login and authentication. The newly revised Lesson 8 covers all three of the most common login models on the Web: session expiration upon browser close, automatically remembering users, and optionally remembering users with a “remember me” checkbox.

5. An all-new section on image upload. Lesson 11 now shows how to add pictures to the Twitter-style “microposts” developed in the tutorial’s main sample application. Topics include client- and server-side image validations, automatic image resizing, and using a cloud storage service (Amazon S3) in production.

6. An all-new lesson on account activation and password resets, including sending email with Rails. The all-new Lesson 10 considerably extends the core sample application by adding account activation (thereby verifying the account’s email address) and allowing users to reset forgotten passwords. In the process, the chapter covers how to send email with Rails, both in development (using the server log) and in production (using SendGrid).

Each lesson in the screencast series corresponds to a chapter in the book, which appear as follows (links are to the online version of the book, which as always is available for free):

• Chapter 1: From zero to deploy

• Chapter 2: A toy app

• Chapter 3: Mostly static pages

• Chapter 4: Rails-flavored Ruby

• Chapter 5: Filling in the layout

• Chapter 6: Modeling users

• Chapter 7: Sign up

• Chapter 8: Log in, log out

• Chapter 9: Updating, showing, and deleting users

• Chapter 10: Account activation and password reset

• Chapter 11: User microposts

• Chapter 12: Following users

As a reminder, you can get a 20% discount on any purchase through the end of the week (Friday, December 5).