A fun way to learn more about Ruby on Rails techniques or plugins is by watching screencast tutorials. Screencasts are short movies covering a specific problem or technique. They are very useful if you are planning on building something with a technique you haven’t used before.

Let’s say you are planning on integrating PayPal into your rails app. Railscasts has a clear screencast on that topic, giving you a runthrough and a example of the entire process needed for ingegrating PayPal. 

This post gives you three great resources for finding Ruby on Rails screencasts. Although Railscasts is the only free one, Envycasts and Peepcode provide such a high quality standard for only $9 that it is really a nobrainer just to buy them.

Railscasts

Every week Ryan Bates will host a new Railscasts episode featuring tips and tricks with Ruby on Rails. These screencasts are short and focus on one technique so you can quickly move on to applying it to your own project. The topics target the intermediate Rails developer, but beginners and experts will get something out of it as well.

Latest Screencasts

Polymorphic Association
Polymorphic associations can be perplexing. In this episode I show you how to set it up in Active Record and then move to the controller and view layer

PDFs with Prawn
Prawn is an excellent Ruby library for generating PDF documents. Learn how to use it along with the Prawnto plugin in this episode.

Rails 2.3 Extras
This episode finishes up this series on Rails 2.3. Here you will learn about several smaller additions in 2.3.

Rack Middleware
Rack middleware is a way to filter a request and response coming into your application. In this episode I show how to modify the response body using middleware.

Sortable Lists
Creating drag & drop sortable lists is fairly easy using Prototype and the built in helper methods. See how in this episode.

PayPal Express Checkout
PayPal Express Checkout is easy to add to an existing ordering system. See how in this episode.

Envycasts

Envycasts is the screencasting side of Rails Envy, a partnership between Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer. However, not all the screencasts you’ll see here are Rails related.

Latest Screencasts

Scaling Ruby
Learn how to write faster Ruby applications and gain a deeper understanding of what it takes to scale Ruby.

Ruby on Rails 2.2 Screencast
Covering the newest features of Rails 2.2 including: Scaling with Etags, Connection Pooling, Internationalization
This screencast also comes with code samples for a great number of the improvements we cover.

Advanced ActiveRecord
In this first EnvyCast we take a look at several advanced features of ActiveRecord, including: Loading Large Data Sets, Foreign Keys, Counter Caching Properly. Between segments you’ll learn a little about “How your brain works” with Dr. Pollack MD.

Peepcode

PeepCode Screencasts are a high-intensity way to learn Ruby on Rails website development.

Experienced developers have said that PeepCode is “fantastic and the price is a steal.” Designer/developers have said they are “exactly the type of instruction I need to pick up new things and understand how they work.” Others have said they are “phenomenal”, “quality” and “totally worth more to me than $9!”

Latest Screencasts

XMPP/JABBER with Ruby
Part of our job at PeepCode is to research new and upcoming technologies that alpha geeks are talking about. XMPP/Jabber instant messaging has been getting more buzz recently. What is it? What does it do? How can you use it to enhance your applications?

Rest for Rails 2
The first REST screencast was the top-selling screencast at PeepCode for over a year. We’ve started from scratch and built this one from the ground up for Rails 2 (a few Rails 2.1 features are used, too!).

Phusion Passenger
Passenger™ makes development easier and is the best way to run Rails applications on shared hosts. You may even find it so easy to use that you choose to deploy your production applications with it as well.

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