Why do these videos make me hate Rails and hate testing. Totally incomprehensible. It might as well be in Japanese.

Because they are boring. They are trying to explain an importance of TDD but they are instead bore you to death.

Srsly not all methodologies are good.

This question made my day. This stuff if tough and a freaking slog. It says am 4 hours from being done, but whenever you are trying to change your application with the videos every hour they predict means 2 or 3 for me. I am on a mission to finish the rails track in 2014, so I have to push through.

The question I am asking myself is how much did I learn, and that is really hard to say. I know a lot more than when I started, but I still cannot do anything from memory. That might be okay though. I have an application idea that I am going to start when I finish this course, and I am thinking I will get stuck every 5 minutes and have to dig through this course to figure it out. But, after that I might be worth something. There might just not be a great way to internalize this stuff, so I am going to slog it out until I get something built.

Happy New Year!

I found that Jason's tendency to cut, copy, paste or edit code without saying he was doing so to be infuriating. I learned far more from the rails guide. Then I let the videos run to get the points and badges:)

For me the best intro to Ruby is Pragmatic Studio course "Ruby Programming"

I have to agree that this particular video jumps a great deal..........there is an awful lot of assumed knowledge here and I think it would have been worthwhile splitting this vid up into 2 parts and for Jason to spend a little more time explaining the process. I am watching this one 3 times.......

I agree Simon. I like treehouse as well. The overall concept is great! My first course was with Andrew Chaulkey. Awesome experience as he ran code then changed it in another segment all the while explaining why. Zac and Nick are also great, though Nick sometimes gets a little fast with the coding.

Overall this has been a great experience for me and I eagerly take more classes.

Is also would pay for that. Definitely. The biggest advances you make in your knowledge (when you are an intermediate programmer) aren't from the 95% of easy stuff - it's having that one situation where you are stuck explained to you -

I would definitely pay a significant premium for that service

I am on my third go round with the whole application. Ruby.org changed their security certificate and absolutely nothing would load for me in rails. Took 3 weeks to find the solution to that.

Simon, you are right, Jason should slow down and explain things a bit better.. I have also found that he does some quick code changes that are not explained and then I get to spend an hour or two troubleshooting my application because I did not see his change.

Jason is very knowledgeable but his eye sees things that he fixes or alters without saying what or why. I hope the Treehouse staff is following this thread!

Just to clarify, I think Treehouse is spectacular and Jason is too! Specifically, I think the TDD course needs to be updated and online learning is amazing; however, in the 5% of times that there is a problem (which often occurs when technology advances and the site content has not yet been revised to be consistent) there is a massive fail and as a student of online learning this is incredibly frustrating. With a live teacher, these are snafus that are fixed with a quick conversation - when coding alone from home, these snafus can snowball and take you weeks to solve. I know there are some sites where you can talk to a live coding expert, but I fear the cost and ROI if the person is not good.

Maybe there could be a premium level where you can pay $20 for 30 minutes with an expert at that specific topic who can screen share and solve your problems.

I'd pay for that.

Also, I think for Lynda, Treehouse or any online learning platform to thrive, they are going to need to find a way to update content with speed and precision to keep up with the endless technology changes. I have no idea how to scale a site where you need to update content, but welcome to technology - whoever figures that out is going to rock it. Outdated content does not fly with students and there is clearly a systemic challenge to update video content when web apps require splicing together 10 resources which are all moving parts. Maybe some entrepreneur out there can envision more flexible video formats or cartoons or something to make video tutorials update in real-time. ;)_