

Tell HN: Rails screencasts.  - hajrice

I've been thinking of creating a series of rails screen casts focused on teaching you how to build an application. I really love RailsCasts, but my focus would be to basically be teaching you by creating an application in every season. To give you a glimpse it'd be something like sitting next to a programmer building a rails application.<p>Basically, season one would be something like building a really powerful blog application, season two, a SaaS app with rails, etc...<p>Interested? Upvote or comment. I'm trying to figure out how many people would be interested...<p>Thanks!
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davidw
I hate screencasts. They force you to sit around watching, don't let you cut
and paste or easily skim the content, and of course _aren't_ like sitting next
to someone in that you can't stop the guy talking and ask him a question.

On the other hand, I'd love to see some good Rails articles.

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jmonegro
Most commercial screencasts ship with the source code. It's subjective,
though, because many people are visual learners.

For example, I had dabbled into jQuery through the docs and tutorials.
However, it wasn't until I got a copy of Peepcode's jQuery screencast that I
really got hold of it.

~~~
hajrice
That's interesting. Some people find it hard to learn by watching a screen
cast. How much value do you see in these rails screencasts ?

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petercooper
I don't think videos are the best way to learn specifics, but in terms of
seeing an overview or "connecting the dots" they work well. Ultimately, the
real learning comes from the doing and by looking up stuff from various
sources. To get the broad view and idea behind a topic, though, a well
produced video can't be beaten.

Given that, I doubt these screencasts would be that interesting if they went
into every little detail - but if they gave the viewer enough confidence and
interest to know what to look up elsewhere, it could work out well.

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scorchin
The hard part about screencasts and interviews is keeping the viewers
attention span. We've seen on Mixergy how the viewer count drops over time --
from Andrew's graphs he makes public. I'd be interested in checking out some
Rails screencasts, but only if they're well edited.

How much of what you build is going to branch back out into front-end code?
HTML/CSS/JS

Do you plan on making the code readily available to follow along? If so, how
are you planning on doing this? Might be an idea to try using a dvcs. Assuming
you plan it well enough, you could potentially have a bash script which will
checkout your code at each video point for the user.

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thibaut_barrere
> only if they're well edited

I second that - an edited and concise screencast is worth much more than an
non-edited one. PeepCode are a very good example about how to do this right!

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hajrice
I'd limit every episode by 5 minutes. www.screenr.com is awesome software. I
haven't found anything that fits my needs apart from it(I'm on Ubuntu)

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thibaut_barrere
+1 for limit to 5 minutes (or concise anyway :-).

About ubuntu - maybe this could be helpful: ?

<http://remi.org/2009/04/16/how-i-record-my-screencasts>

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hajrice
Thanks for responding with a useful link. Unfortunately, recordMyScreen is a
bit ... "slow" in terms of video quality.

I think I'll stick with screenr, it limits me to 5 minutes per video anyway!

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patrickk
I really like peepcode:

peepcode.com

I'm learning rails at the moment and I find it quite useful - especially from
the very start of my immersion into the world of rails. You may get
'inspiration' from these guys ;-)

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justinchen
+1 for peepcode.

Just watch objective-c/iphone series once and you'll be writing iphone apps
right away.

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csuper
<http://www.railstutorial.org/>

This is a book teaches you how to build a Twitter like applications. According
to the site it will eventually be accompanied by screencasts.

I do like screencast though. I say go for it but teach folks how to build a
different application than the one in Rails Tutorial.

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sunchild
I know I'm not alone when I say that Ryan Bates' railscasts.com has saved me
countless hours of frustration, and expanded my vision of what Rails is
capable of doing. Few presenters can match Ryan's clear, pleasant style. In
terms of free offerings, there isn't likely to be anything more comprehensive
and professional.

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terrellm
I'd think you would have to look at it like writing a book, except with the
chapters being in video instead of text. I think trying to approach it as a
series of RailsCasts would not cater to the type of people who want such a
structured learning system. One of RailsCasts best benefits is that you learn
on your own terms, which is the opposite of what you are going for it sounds
like.

There are many different learning styles and some people like to see rather
than read so I think it has potential. You may check out LearnVisualStudio.net
as they have been selling videos for years, including videos that go from
nothing to building a full featured application.

Good luck in your venture - the more ways people can learn rails, the more it
will attract new developers and grow the ecosystem.

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hajrice
I love the idea of turning this into a book, yet the problem with a book is
that due to how fast rails moves, the actual content would eventually become
outdated.

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terrellm
Agreed - most books become outdated by the time they reach the bookshelves.

I'm saying more of a book approach than a screencast approach. Most books
start at the ground up, with each chapter building on the previous, while many
screencasts tend to be independent of previous episodes.

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bricestacey
I usually don't care for screencasts about technology because they often treat
the viewer like a dumbass. For example, they'll spend 30 seconds introducing
themselves or explaining what they're going to do even if it's super trivial.
I would suggest trying to be as concise, but still be as digestible as
possible. If your screencast is actually useful and 5 minutes long, I might
watch it again. If it's 10 minutes and just okay, no way am I going back to
it.

Hope this helps. I'm also interested. I am learning ruby now and soon I want
to start learning rails.

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thibaut_barrere
I think it's a very good idea, both based on my own opinion and on feedback I
got on <http://www.learnivore.com> which I run.

Would you focus on Rails 3 directly ?

One remark: I would take care of sound quality and would not use the
integrated microphone, but an external (even cheap, like head-set) one.

Feel free to contact me by mail (see profile) if you want to chat about your
idea!

~~~
petercooper
_One remark: I would take care of sound quality and would not use the
integrated microphone, but an external (even cheap, like head-set) one._

Right on. Crappy sound has made me turn off many a screencast (mostly informal
ones, sure). The worst is when you can hear both the keyboard _and_ a MacBook
Pro fan whirring up because it can only just about deal with recording the
screencast ;-)

A USB microphone like a Blue Snowball or one of the Samson things only costs
$100 or so. Though even with a headset, if you know what you're doing you can
run some EQ to make it sound bearable (Garageband is even good for this if you
have nothing better).

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ericb
I say, start with the SaaS app. The blog thing has been done to death. Also,
can you do a non screencast blog post of it as you go?

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petercooper
For anyone who wants a non screencast Rails tutorial, BTW, this one came out
recently: <http://www.railstutorial.org/>

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ApolloRising
I highly suggest you also talk about the WHY a great deal. I buy quite a few
screencasts and knowing your audience is a hugely important thing.

Some of us don't have the programming background to leverage and the why of
where you are putting code, why it is better than shoving everything into the
view etc is important. 5 minutes would be too short I think for most useful
learning exercises. I agree peeepcode does this quite well.

An example screencast that I would purchase would be using authlogic and then
adding and extending functionality to fit your needs. Adding lost password
functions, user levels, etc. That would give a nice complete view of a very
commonly used item and useful across any project you are going to create on
your own.

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atomon
I would definitely be interested in watching this, and I think the amount of
feedback in this thread shows that others would be too. If you look at the
Feedback section of railscasts.com you'll see that the second most popular
request is for Ryan Bates to "Build an entire application over a series of
screencasts" and it has almost 1500 votes.

Others have already pointed this out, but it's important to keep the
screencasts short and try to split each project up into smaller videos by
topic. I like screencasts, but there's nothing worse than sitting through an
hour long video for 10 minutes of content. It's a waste of time, and it makes
it difficult to find the valuable content again later without re-watching the
whole video.

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jmonegro
I like it. A good marketing strategy, btw, would be to release the first one
for free (the blog one), because there are many blog-in-rails tutorials and
screencasts. This way people would see the alleged quality of your screencasts
and be incited to buy the others.

~~~
hajrice
Yes. Teaching others can definitely be a good marketing strategy. I think that
Obie Fernandez made HashRocket really popular through his book, "The Rails
Way"

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raju
I like the idea. I would love to see a somewhat complex app written using
Rails. How long do you think each screencast would be?

I agree with some of the other commentators that many like reading vs.
watching a screencast (and it does not help that you can't copy-paste code),
so perhaps you might consider putting the code out there.

~~~
hajrice
Thanks for the feedback. Every episode would be limited to 5 minutes.

The code would be publicly available via github.

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johns
If you're looking for more examples for comparison, tekpub.com has really good
screencasts, including a series for Rails.

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Hexstream
If you have to count on others this much to get enough motivation to get
started you'll most likely get nowhere. I'd advise to be more self-reliant.
This goes for all projects of appreciable complexity.

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randito
If you've got an itch, scratch it. If you're thinking about it, and you keep
thinking about it, and it won't let you go, then do it.

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sgallant
I think this is a great idea. It sounds like I would get a lot out of
something like this.

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pneill
There's a really good learning ruby on rails DVD from lynda.com

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mrphoebs
sounds great

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hajrice
Thanks. Do you have any suggestions, I'd really appreciate hearing your
opinion on this.

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mrphoebs
Any material that gives a holistic view (that will be an aid to n00bs like me)
or exploring the limitations of rails while building real world applications
would be interesting. Where is it hard to work idiomatically within the
framework of rails and what are the workarounds... just some thoughts

