John Topley’s Weblog

I was recently extolling the virtues of the Mac in a guest post on my friend John’s blog and I mentioned that you can buy a five-user Mac OS X family pack for the good-value price of £139. Well blow me if Apple haven’t gone and put the price right up. From Amazon UK:

—That’s a bit steep even for the Apple faithful who are used to reaching deep into their wallets. At that price even Windows Vista Ultimate starts to look like good value!

That got your attention, didn’t it? Maybe not deal of the century, but if you’re a UK-based Rails developer then you owe it to yourself to check out the PeepCode subscription packs. Given the current weak state of the dollar it would be rude not to. I’ve just bought a ten-pack which cost the princely sum of £36.69. That’s over ten hours of properly produced video with Geoffrey Grosenbach teaching you Ruby on Rails. It’s a little known fact that over 85% of the Web is now comprised of Rails sites that Geoffrey has developed.† This boy knows his beans!

To put it into perspective, £36.69 is about the price of a decent dinner for two at ASK/Zizzi/Pizza Express/Strada/your favourite authentic Italian restaurant chain. That’s shockingly good value for money. Don’t you think it’s time you put down that Fettucine and did some Test-Driven Development?

The PeepCode videos are also available for video iPods, so whilst all the losers on the bus are filling their empty heads with County & Western songs about a man named Clint whose dog left him for another woman, you can be sitting pretty on the back seat learning all the Rails ninja moves like REST, Capistrano and RJS. If that doesn’t get you the girls then you’re on your own, squire. Please note that I’m not affiliated with PeepCode in any way, I just call it how it is.

† The actual figure may be less.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer have just started a great new Ruby on Rails blog named Rails Envy. They’ve got off to a flying start with tutorials on the Rails page caching mechanism and using the Ferret text search engine from within a Rails app. One to watch!