Just a quick post to describe two excellent on-line resources that I have found to be extremely helpful as we enter the mid-point of our training at DaVinci Coders.

The first is Ryan Bates’ excellent RailsCasts series of Ruby on Rails screencasts. While this is a subscription service, Ryan has generously made many of his older screencasts available for free. The amount of technical expertise and pro-level tips is absolutely amazing for me as a junior Rails dev. Prior to this I had no real notion of some of the topics that RailsCasts covers, but now that I’m working with Rails every day, this content is absolutely priceless.

The second is the CodeShip series called Testing Tuesday. As the name suggests, these are short video tutorials on various aspects of TDD and BDD tools and skills, like RSpec, Cucumber, and other languages beyond Ruby and Rails. Even better, these are free. They are also posted online at Vimeo.

The beauty of both of these resources – and I’m sure there are others – is that they are short and to the point. Each are about 10 minutes long, and address a problem or provide an overview of a technique that you can put to work right away.

Next time you are browsing the web and watching YouTube videos, take a look at one of these resources and learn something that will make you a better developer.