Screencasting
Personally we’ve found RailsCast videos really useful while learning different aspects of Rails. Watching someone guide you through putting all the relevant pieces together is a great way to help understand things. Watching someone doing something is always better than reading about it in a book. Given this, and the fact that Konstantin has been wanting to SinatraCast for a long time, we thought it would be good to make some screencasts of what we ourselves were learning with Sinatra. They could act as a useful tool for others wanting to build a simple Sinatra app :-)
Screencasts, however, take forever to make. They really do. It’s all the finicky setting up of files and windows and timing everything properly and giving good voice over. Not to mention how long it takes to render and export video files and upload them to the web at a decent quality. Before you realise it the day is almost over, and you’ve only managed to record half of what you wanted (and not nearly as well as you’d like).
Take 25 anyone?
Luckily we were able to use Camtasia, an indespensible piece of screen-capturing goodness, and break into some 7 minute workouts while we waited for video to export.
For now, Tutorial Part 1 is finished. It’s somewhat rough and ready, the sound is a bit dodgy, and we used a version of Ruby we shouldn’t have (1.8.something) but it’s a start. You can download a copy of the finished files for the app here. And fyi the best online video wesite for serving screencasts seems to be Screencast.com which doesn’t compress your videos in any way (unlike YouTube or Vimeo). This means that the image doesn’t lose any detail, which is very important when your video is filled with pages of relatively small type/code.
