There are some really helpful people in the Rails community, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who helps bunny and green coders more than Ryan Bates. Ryan's own site Railscasts.com is easily my favourite screencast - I like it better than my own!

I attended RailsConf 2007, where it was revealed that REST would become the preferred way of building Rails apps. REST is so much front and centre that in the upcoming Rails 2.0 the scaffold generator is going to be replaced by scaffold_resource. Ryan walks me through this code line by line, explaining what things are and how they work. Thanks Ryan for the guided tour into a working Rails app. It's really helping me learn how this stuff fits together.

Better make some popcorn to watch this one though. It's just shy of an hour and 40 minutes long! (sorry it's so long, but I just couldn't bear cutting stuff out).

In the previous screencast David Heinemeier Hansson impressed upon me the importance of deciding what it is I want to build. It's difficult to learn programming in the abstract. By building something I need and care about I can learn piecemeal, asking just the questions I need to solve the next step.

So I wrote down what I want to build and showed it to my next guest Amy Hoy. It became clear pretty quickly that I need to go back to the drawing board - literally! Amy's advice is to separate the design and coding phases. Then design first. Her pragmatic approach put me at ease and I learned it's not all about the tools. It's about being creative and getting ideas out of my head and in front of me so they can be worked and reworked into something cool.

The screencast itself ran into some technical problems...no - scratch that - it was self-inflicted again. That being said, I hope you get as much out of the conversation as I did (plus it was a whole lot of fun :)

This screencast is a pair programming session between David Heinemeier Hansson and myself (Miles K. Forrest). I'm new to web application programming and a "bunny hill" rails developer at best, so to have a world-class developer take the time to go over some basics on how to get started was very encouraging and valuable to me. If you're also new to Rails perhaps this 35 minute screencast might help point you in the right direction.

Over the coming weeks it's my intention to build a working Rails application that I need and record the journey through this series of screencasts. I welcome anyone to do a screencast with me who is interested in sharing their expertise and is patient enough to teach a slow learner like myself.