Review: Envycasts What’s New In Rails 2.2

Posted on November 5th, 2008 by Jeff

So Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack have turned their podcasting talents towards making screencasts. They call them envycasts. I’m a regular listener of the podcast and enjoy their lighthearted style so when Gregg was looking for reviewers of their latested episode, I jumped at the chance.

I’m not going to cover all the Rails goodness present in the ‘cast; that’d take the joy out of the whole thing for you, now wouldn’t it?

Vital Statistics:

  • Title:  Ruby on Rails Envycast .
  • Length: 45 minutes
  • Resolution: 640×480, millions of colors
  • Size: 260MB
  • Extras: 118 page PDF by Carlos Brando / Carl Youngblood

The video quality was quite good, and it’s obvious that these guys have high production values. The embedded bookmarks within the video were nice; I was able to jump to sections of the envycast without having to randomly scrub through the video.

Topics:

  • ActiveRecord
  • ActiveSupport
  • ActionPack
  • ActionController
  • Railties
  • Internationalization
  • Performance

If you’re familiar with the RailsEnvy podcasts, the guys continue their relaxed but fast-paced presentation throughout this episode. It’s nice to see code samples along with each new feature being introduced along with some explanation; I would have liked to see more detail in the sample, or more justification for the feature. Some portions of the video seem to suffer from over-editing; in one scene on connection pooling it appears that the middle of Gregg’s explanation of the example was left on the editing room floor; I found it hard to follow. I’ll need to do some independent reading to find out how the connection pooling in Rails 2.2 actually works. After all, the ‘cast did come with a 118 page companion PDF!

Best part of the episode: the explanation of etags. I think Gregg and Jason did a great job on a tricky subject here. Though there’s something about the name etags that rings a bell….hmm, wonder where I’ve heard of it?

All in all, at just $16 for the bundle, this is a great value for anyone doing Rails development. Just watch out for the pigeons!

Filed under: Rails, reviews

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