Pragmatic Studio Training
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Earlier this week, I attended the Pragmatic Studio Rails Training in Dallas, TX. The course is taught by Dave Thomas and Mike Clark. Both are talented, motivational trainers and the course material is top notch.As I’m more used to sitting on the trainers’ side of the table, it was obvious to me they’d taken a great deal of care to develop the material. Having read the Agile Web Development book, I thought the course did a great job of tying those concepts together and filling in the gaps left by the print.
Since I’ve already built several Rails applications, I took the training with the intention of solidifying my foundation of Rails and Ruby fundamentals. I feel that I definitely achieved that goal. While the course was suitable for most beginners, there was enough sprinkling of tricks, idioms, opinion, and humor to keep participants of most skill levels engaged.
The training was highly oriented towards exercises and labs. For the most part, everyone was able to work at their own pace. Novices got the help they needed while more experienced users didn’t get bored. I was also pleased that the course material was current and at least touched on some of the newer features in Rails such as ActiveResource and more advanced topics like deploying with Capistrano.
Overall, it was a great experience and I’m looking forward to attending more training courses offered by Pragmatic Studio in the future.
