Video screencasts are great for learning. Ruby On Rails is used by many programmers to build website quickly. Here are two sites offering Ruby on Rails video screencasts for learning.

RailsCasts, created by Ryan Bates, is a free Ruby on Rails screencast site dedicated exclusively to Ruby. There are 100+ screencasts currently available on RailsCasts. You can browse screencasts by tags, or check out the archives.

HacketyHack bills itself as a coders starter kit, teaching you to code in Ruby interactively. There are seven free lessons, including one that allows them to develop a blog with just six lines of code. The site audience seems to be new programmers.

http://hacketyhack.net/

Jack Dorsey and Alex Payne of Twitter discuss the development the popular messaging site.

There should be warning messages: I tried to follow the "Putting Flickr on Rails" screencast from Rubyonrails.org but my application didn't work. It turns out the tutorial is outdated and the flickr gem has been replaced by rflickr.

See:
http://blog.couloir.org/past/2007/1/28/flickr_off_rails/
http://www.maxdunn.com/RoR+and+Flickr

So far I'm up to 'generating a Flickr Token,' portion of the Max Dunn tutorial. I am getting errors on the 'f.auth.getFrob' step. So there is more investigating to be done and I will try this again later.

I really like the Hobo gem and now that Opendesign.org is back up I can follow along with "POD Demo - Replacing the Theme." In addition to Quicktime, it looks like the screencasts will also be converted to Flash.

Hobo can be downloaded from http://hobocentral.net/blog/

I have been investigating Ruby on Rails for the past two weeks. It looks like a really great platform to quickly create applications. I have borrowed several books on it from my local library and created a few sample applications and think it is a keeper.