Ruby and Ruby on Rails crash course syllabus

Question

I intend to design an induction plan or you can say a crash course syllabus for developers starting to learn Ruby and Ruby on rails. I am not sure about number of topics to be covered (And the depth of coverage) as this is a 3 day course (24 to 27 hours). Also, newbies tend to compare ruby with existing object oriented programming veterans like C++, Java or C#. But since Ruby is pretty different (Absence of abstract classes, interfaces, virtual keyword etc and presence of concepts like modules, mixins etc), how should the course be designed so that newbies start "thinking" in ruby? Because, I believe that once they start doing that, those experienced in C++, Java or C# can pick it up quickly.

Could I get some tips or possibly an abstract of ruby/rails course which you might be using already from experienced ruby/rails instructors?

The intend is to make newbies, the developers of production ruby/rails applications as soon as possible.

The course can be extended to be of up to 5 days (40 to 45 hours) if needed.

Answer 1

I like to show people code to illustrate the differences. How about you start with a simple loop:

10.times do |x| ...

Showing that even a fixed number is an object should wake them up.

You could also show that it's never too late to modify a class:

class Fixnum
    attr_accessor :foo
end

>> 10.foo = "bar"
=> "bar"

A quick look on Ruby in Twenty Minutes could give some ideas too: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/

Answer 2

I think this excellent tutorial will help to get started with rails real quick: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/12/14/revisiting-ruby-on-rails-revisited.html
It demonstrates how you go about building a simple rails app and i think thats the best way to show people how its different. and once you've got their attention, throw in other things like mixins etc.