Scaling Rails - A free 13-part series of screencasts
New Relic - the Rails app performance monitoring folks - has launched RailsLab, a free resource for Rails developers who want to learn about things relating to Rails application performance. They've kicked it off with a free 13 part screencast series by Gregg Pollack (of EnvyCasts fame) called Scaling Rails. There are seven episodes live so far and you can download all of them in MPEG4 format for free.
The episodes so far cover page responsiveness, page caching, cache expiration, New Relic's RPM service, advanced page caching, action caching, and fragment caching respectively. There's a lot to learn here, and for free it's, well, excellent value for money ;-)
It's interesting to see a company like New Relic sponsoring screencasting efforts (and, I'm told, there's more of this sort of thing to come) rather than them being released commercially. Do you think this is a good way forward? Since everyone gets the content for free and there appears to be no conflict of interest here or in the content, I'm all for it, but I'd love to hear your opinions in the comments here.
Disclaimer: New Relic is a sponsor of Rails Inside.
February 11th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
As long as it doesn't get too spammy with New Relic stuff, it's all okay with me.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:15 am
I think it's a great method. The more I learn on Rails the more likely I am to use something like New Relic. If not for your podcasts I'm not sure I would know what New Relic was.