Ruby on Rails May Workshop May 12, 2009

Attendees: Please complete the tasks listed here before showing up:
http://gist.github.com/110499

NOTE: despite the calendar data, this workshop runs Tuesday & Thursday from 6pm-8pm starting May 12 and ending June 11.

About Rails:
Rails (http://rubyonrails.org/) is a full-stack (all the parts are designed together) web application framework that focuses on rapid development and ease of maintance. Rails was created in 2005 and is the technology behind a number of popular web applications:
http://twitter.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/
http://m.wikipedia.org/
http://www.basecamphq.com/
http://www.yellowpages.com/
http://github.com/
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.scribd.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/
http://nytimes.com/ (all their custom apps for special topics).

If you've spent the last 5 years developing in PHP, Java, or Perl Ruby on Rails will likely come as a delightful breath of fresh air to your development process. Even if you never code in Rails after the course, the patterns and best practices encapsulated in Rails will change the way you think about web projects.

About the class:
We're two UM Alumni who've been developing and teaching Rails since 2005. We've taught both U courses (through the School of Information) and community oriented courses aimed at turning non-web developers into web developers.

This workshp was designed specifically for CSE/EECS majors. Although anyone is welcome to attend, the topics and pace are aimed at someone who has previous experience with an OOP language. We teach by example and use the official documentation and community guides as a text resource (no books to buy). Each participant must bring their own laptop. *NIX varieties are preferred (including Mac OS X). Windows users are highly encouraged to run Linux on a USB drive or extra partition. (Rails works fine on Windows, but all of the examples assume a *NIX-style environment).