With the growing popularity of the Ruby Programming language in India, the University of Pune proposes to introduce Ruby Programming as part of the Masters in Computer Management (MCM) post-graduate course, from June 2008.

The University has uploaded the new syllabus on the web so that students, members of the public and experts may post their comments.

After the runaway success of the third batch of the Free Online Ruby Programming Course, that has 2190 participants, the next batch has been announced for 1st March 2008.

Here’s your chance to learn Ruby programming for free, at the comfort of your home and along with an online teacher.

This course is ideal for those of you who want to complement your skill-set with Ruby, but haven’t quite found the time to do so. There would be online lessons, exercises, quizzes and assignments all the way. You are free to ask all your Ruby related doubts, queries and questions and rest assured that they would be answered.

The course is open to all and will cover Core and Advanced Ruby. The syllabus is already available online, so you can get started early by planning what you’re going to cover. To take part, all you have to do is create an account at the site and enroll in the course. Detailed instructions are available there.

The first such course was held in August 2006 with over 100 students participating. The second held in August 2007 had over 500 students participating. The current third batch has 2190 participants. This would be the fourth batch.

The parent RubyLearning site is a great Ruby resource for newcomers to the language. The current course is designed using Moodle a free, open-source course management system (CMS).

Interested? Register now. Registrations close on 29th February 2008 at 18.00 hrs IST.

Do pass this word to all your friends, colleagues. Don’t let this opportunity slip away.

Dave Thomas just announced that the Third Edition of the PickAxe has just entered beta. Each edition of the book tracks the latest Ruby release, and each is the definitive reference to Ruby. This third edition maintains that tradition, and has been updated to reflect the new features of Ruby 1.9.

In Dave’s words, here’s the plan. “I’m starting with the second edition text and going through it revising for 1.9 changes. So far I’m done the first 120 pages or so. When you look at the beta book, you’ll see some pages with red headers and footers, and others with gray. The red pages are updated content, and the gray pages are content from the second edition. Over time, more and more pages will turn red, until the book is done.

Matz is still making changes to 1.9 functionality. This book will track these changes, so that it will mirror what 1.9 becomes as we move towards an eventual release. We won’t go to press until Ruby has stabilized.”

The RubyLearning.com site has been active for some time now and the users of my site are normally people learning the Ruby programming language. For the last two years, I have been promoting the Ruby language in whatever way I can and have been keen knowing whether Ruby is catching on in India or not. With the help of Google Analytics, I sat down to analyze the ‘Ruby Usage Trend in Indian Cities‘.

Statistical purists might laugh at my sampling data but I believe that this data represents the trend fairly accurately. Amongst the 100’s of Indian Cities in my analytics data, I selected the top 20% cities that covered 80% of my site’s total hits during the period May to October 2007. The cities that qualified were Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad in that order.

The Trend Chart

Some Results

1. Pune and Hyderabad had a slow start, but both cities have an increasing trend of usage. I am happy with the substantial increase in the usage of Ruby in Pune.
2. Chennai and Bangalore seem to have started cooling off - why?
3. I have the figures for November (so far) and Pune and Hyderabad continue to show a far rapid increase than previous months

Why is there such a rapid growth in Pune and Hyderabad? Have not heard of any high-profile Ruby projects coming here. Lots of questions - no clear answers.

What do you think? Do you have a different perspective on this? Do post your viewpoint here.

I have been asked time and again about ‘Rails Hosting In India‘ and thought it best that I list down the Rails Hosts that I have heard of, in India.

Here’s the list, not in any specific order:

1. Traffic Pullz - a very detailed list of services available with them (related to Rails) has been mentioned on their site.
2. WebServerIndia - provides linux and windows web hosting and also offer Reseller Web Hosting Services in India. They support Ruby on Rails Hosting, cPanel Hosting, PHP, MySQL, (Support available in English and Hindi).
3. Web Hosting Delhi - I believe that they support Ruby on Rails Hosting but I could not find a mention about that on their site.
4. Web Hosting India - offer Rails hosting via their Linux Reseller Hosting Plan.

I agree, not many hosts but I am sure more would follow. I would appreciate if you could comment here about your experiences with these hosts and of any other host not mentioned here.

Reference: RailsWebHosts - though most Rails hosts have been mentioned here, this url is not easily ‘findable’.