Pete Yadlowsky at the University of Virginia is teaching a short course in Ruby to some of his co-workers. The class meets 2 hours once/week for six weeks. It presently meets on Tuesdays, and so he calls it “Ruby Tuesdays” (a humorous allusion to the famous Rolling Stones song and to a restaurant chain). He was looking for good teaching materials and found rubylearning.com, among others. Thanks Pete and all the best for the “Ruby Tuesdays.”

Update:
The University of Washington extension center is offering a Ruby Programming Certificate Program. The instructor for this programme would be Ryan Davis, founding member of the Seattle Ruby Brigade.

From the programme:

The Certificate is practical and hands-on. The first course provides an overview of the language and introduce many of the key concepts needed to begin programming quickly. The second course focuses on application development with “Rails.” Students will work on developing web sites and then iteratively develop projects to enhance those websites. The third course emphasizes the remaining advanced topics in the Ruby Programming language. All courses are project-focused and hands-on, allowing students the ability to engage in real-world applications and to interact with others in a group-work setting. The course will also focus on working within the open-source community and contributing to its overall development.

Binghamton University, State University of New York is also using this site as one of their references.

Good to see more and more Universities offering such courses.

Commenters Note: I use the “DoFollow” plug-in.

Peter Cooper has done it again! Peter has just launched JRuby Inside a new “sister” site to his very popular Ruby Inside. JRuby Inside focuses just on JRuby.

About JRuby Inside, Peter says:

JRuby Inside is not just a blog. It collates links from various sources, allows me (as the webmaster) to promote certain ones to posts or to the RSS feed, and even allows regular visitors to submit posts. It’s a more freeform but less demanding site than Ruby Inside, but hopefully will provide just as much value in a smaller niche.

Peter, the very best wishes from the Ruby and Java communities for the success of JRuby Inside.

Today’s web-based applications are required to provide more storage, more compute power, and a greater level of reliability than ever before. With a pay-as-you-go model, Amazon Web Services, combined with freely available RubyGems and Rails plug-ins, provides enterprise-class capability to Ruby on Rails applications. Using the power of Ruby on Rails and RESTful web services, developers can get up and going in hours instead of days.

Robert Dempsey’s tutorial introduces you to Amazon Web Services from the eyes of a Ruby developer, walks through a simple example, and links to other helpful resources to get you started. Give it a try!

The Brainwave DevNet Conference is being held at Hyderabad, India on 27th July 2007. At this conference, Brainwave would be releasing the commercial version of their product ‘The Brainwave Platform’ - an end to end enterprise application development and deployment solution stack, that strives to reduce development time, cost and frees you from hassles of incorporating any new business process.

Registration is free and everyone’s invited.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Google Trends shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

Taking this further, I decided to see the trend for Ruby on Rails for the year 2007.

Amongst Regions, India is ranked second. When I clicked on India, I found that amongst Subregions Karnataka and Maharashtra are at the top - obviously due to Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune. However to my surprise the city Pune was not listed. Pune, incidentally has one of the largest Ruby User Groups in the world. Also surprising was that Belgaum was listed amongst cities. The data as of today is only for Jan and Feb 2007.

What is re-assuring is that Ruby on Rails is on the up-surge in India.