One thing I love about rails is the variety of great resources in a variety of useful mediums. There’s podcasts, books, a ton of great blogs, wiki’s, forums, chat rooms, mailing lists, user groups and more. Sometimes after a hard days coding I’m a bit too jaded to carry on hacking away or reading technical books but one thing I find I can do with five minutes to spare is listen to podcasts and screencasts. The great thing about these is you can watch them on your ipod anyway anytime. There are 3 great screencast resources as far I’m aware.

Introduction to Rails: If your new to Ruby on Rails and want to see what its all about then there is no better place to start than here with the now infamous how to write a blog application in 15 minutes. Its a great way to get a feel for Rails but it sure is neat marketing and by no means do you have a production ready fully functional blog in 15 minutes so take it with a pinch of salt.

Railscasts: If you want some great, professional bite size Rails lessons then one of my favourite resources right now is Ryan Bates’ Railscasts . These are just awesome, short tips and tricks for rails. But what I like most about them is how relevant they are. I find you can read books and blogs with great technical insight and then get started on projects and not know how to do seemingly trivial things. Ryans screencasts offer great, tidy answers to real world implementation problems. One thing I learned recently was the fantastic rails addition to Array things.collect(&:property) syntax as short hand for collecting the result of a call to the property method on all the “things”. Rails doesn’t stop surprising me. These look great on your iPod video too.

PeepCode: Last but best of all are the peepcode screencasts by Rails socialite Geoffrey Grosenbach. These are in depth tutorials which explain core Rails concepts from novice to expert in 1- 1.5hr screencasts. They include so far Capistrano, PrototypeJS, TDD and RESTful rails among other things. These are detailed and thorough and he uses experts in the given areas to advise him so he gets it all spot on and bang up to date. These are really valuable each one probably equivelent to a half day training session for which you’d pay a fair amount of cash. But these babies are only $9 a pop which is an absolute bargain for what they contain. Again they come in iPod video format or .mov files. Because they are quite involved you may find following along with the code on an iPod a little tricky as it is barely legible. Still fantastic resource and worth every penny to speed up the ruby and rails learning curve.

Well that’s about it for screencasts. As a community we are so lucky to have people that provide this quality of resource, cheers guys! Take a look at them, subscribe and enjoy.