"Rails 3.0 is ponies and rainbows! It's going to cook you dinner and fold your laundry. You're going to wonder how life was ever possible before it arrived."  Okay, so it won't do your dreaded household chores, but seriously, the February 2011 public release of Rails 3.0 is exciting!  It is lighter, more agile, and easier to understand than older versions, and developers can move their existing applications to Rails 3 without having to rewrite their old code right away.  Some of the  highlighted features of this release are listed below. 

• New router with an emphasis on RESTful declarations
• New Action Mailer API modeled after Action Controller  
• New Active Record chainable query language built on top of relational algebra
• Unobtrusive JavaScript helpers with drivers for Prototype, jQuery, and more coming (end of inline JS)
• Explicit dependency management with Bundler

As you can see, it's a great time to be a Rails developer.  Come and take our Ruby on Rails class on 9/15.  Or, if you have five or more students interested in this course, we can schedule a class for you anytime!

REGISTER NOW!

 

- Article taken from http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/3_0_release_notes.html 

Computer users often perform tedious tasks that they would like to automate.  Some users may need to perform a search-and-replace over a large number of text files.  Others may want to rename or rearrange numerous photo files in a complicated way. Still others may want to write a custom database or a simple game.

On the other hand are professional software developers who may have to work with several C/C++/Java libraries but find the usual write/compile/test/re-compile cycle is too slow. Or, they may be writing a test suite for such a library and find writing the testing code a tedious task.

If either of the above describes you, then Python just may be the language for you.  It is simple to use, but it is a real programming language, offering much more structure and support for large programs than shell scripts or batch files can offer.  Python also offers a high level of error checking and has high-level data types built in, such as flexible arrays and dictionaries.

Python allows you to split your program into modules that can be reused in other Python programs. It comes with a large collection of standard modules that you can use as the basis of your programs - or as examples to start learning to program in Python. 

 

Python is an interpreted language, which can save you considerable time during program development because no compilation and linking is necessary.  It also enables programs to be written compactly and readably.  

 

Python is extensible: if you know how to program in C it is easy to add a new built-in function or module to the interpreter, either to perform critical operations at maximum speed, or to link Python programs to libraries that may only be available in binary form (such as a vendor-specific graphics library).

 

So, if you are somewhat new to programming but have some basic experience or knowledge, or if you already know one or more languages, Python may just be the perfect language for you to learn.  We are offering this class on 7/19 and 9/26.  REGISTER HERE for either class!  

 

Article taken from http://docs.python.org/tutorial/appetite.html