Thomas, It really depends on her background, personality, time commitment and expectations.
I looked at several RoR courses before deciding on self-study a few weeks ago and have been digging through a number of worthwhile books and courses. The two local course were Davinci Coders and another in Denver (can't find the link, but it was affiliated with Living Social. They mentioned that pretty much everyone in the first course was immediately hired by Living Social, so it was really about buying yourself a job). While not quite full-time, both were three or four months with a heavy time commitment (20+ hours per week). Maybe that might work with a really flexible work situation, but definitely not a regular day job. http://davincicoders.com/ [UPDATE] Just found the other link. It's a spin-off from Living Social called Hungry Academy and taught by JumpStart Labs. Runs 5 months. Bit different than I remember since it looks like a paid internship now and is being taught in DC. http://hungryacademy.com/ With previous programming experience, you'll spend a lot of time waiting for other people while concepts are being explained. That's one huge advantage of 1-on-1 tutoring. The longer courses are generally geared toward complete beginners and I'm personally not convinced it's possible enough to become proficient in 3-4 months starting from scratch. Or at least not proficient enough to be hired as a self-sufficient developer. Aside from Ruby / Rails, the toolset required is pretty large. Almost all the jobs I've seen posted expect reasonable proficiency in Ruby, Rails, Git, rSpec (and any number of popular testing suites), one or more Javascript frameworks and at least passing familiarity with the more popular gems. Toss in learning a text editor / IDE, command shell, regex, publishing, etc. and it feels like 12-18 months is more likely depending on ability and time commitment. If it's more like "Hey, is this something I might find interesting", there are countless online beginner resources that provide a quick overview. Rails for Zombies is entertaining for a quick walkthrough. For more serious online self-study, Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl covers a lot of ground in a comprehensive manner and JumpStart Labs has a pretty solid series of tutorials. PeepCode and RailsCast are two other great resources I've been using. The big thing is how you like to learn. I pick up things easily, enjoy moving at a rapid pace and am perfectly content pounding through a 800 page book on my own. All of which makes classroom learning kind of painful for me, but it's great for many people. I decided on self-study for 2-3 months while writing code, followed by looking for an internship and/or mentor before starting a full rewrite of our web app in RoR. http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/ http://railsforzombies.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ https://peepcode.com/ http://railscasts.com/ Cheers, Chris _______________________________________________ Bdrg-members mailing list Bdrg-members@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/bdrg-members
