I recently took the Rails for Zombies Redux and Rails for Zombies 2 courses on CodeSchool. I had already learned some Rails on a Software Engineering Course , but I thought these would be helpful, specially since I didn't touch anything on Rails after I finished the course. I also intend to rewrite the user key generation/retrieval of my software to use either a Rails app or WordPress.
The courses are interesting and fairly light. They consist of short videos and usually very simple challenges, that mostly just require you to read the notes. There is a zombie theme on the code (which is mostly about a Twitter for Zombies), that lightens up the topic somehow. The challenges take place in an easy to use in browser coding system. You just type some code and click submit (keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work on Chrome), and get the results.
Challenges always worked fine, but I found that on some courses on CodeSchool video simply refuses to play. However, I just downloaded these, so problem solved (except for not having closed captions).
On the subject of Ruby and Rails, every time I learn something new about it I am usually more impressed about how clever and easy things are.
Overall, the courses are quite useful, but they don't really compare to the Software Engineering Course – which covers much more material and had actually challenging course work. However, it took me about 30 hours, while both of these took around 8 hours, so it is not really a fair comparison.
And I also learned some stuff on the Zombie courses that were not on the Software Engineering Course (including some new bits introduced in the latest versions of Rails).
Rails for Zombies Redux is a free course, so if you are interested in the topic it is a good place to start.
