A popular six-week Ruby on Rails course taught at New York's General Assembly last year is now available online. Is $2800 too much to pay for a Ruby on Rails class? Post your thoughts below.  Daniel Doubrovkine, head of engineering at Artsy.net,  posted the curriculum on Github and licensed it under Creative Commons. The class summary:

We start by introducing students to the Ruby development environment and show elementary Ruby code. Students also learn how to use Git and exercise the development workflow via Github, including pull requests and topic branches. We dive into Ruby basics and conclude with object-oriented features, mixins and exception handling. After the class gains enough familiarity with the language features, we teach Rack, an essential foundation of any solid Ruby on Rails knowledge. The instructor builds a basic web application that serves static files from the file system with Rack. A Rails application is then assembled from scratch without the use of Rails generators. Tests are written with the default unit test infrastructure, and once again use behavior-driven development with RSpec. The application is deployed on Heroku. We step aside to teach Ruby meta-programming before lecturing on ActiveRecord, ERB, HAML and SASS. The instructor then builds authentication without using an off-the-shelf library. This combination of technologies gives the students the necessary tools to build a complete project, which is typically introduced around the 6th lecture. When this material was developed we asked the students to build a Ruby on Rails clone of the popular Stashboard application. Final lectures include RESTful APIs with Rails and Grape, an introduction to NoSQL databases with MongoDB. We also recommend you offer students an opportunity to revisit any topic that was insufficiently clear or lecture on a topic that they are curious about.

A lot of developers thought the December class cost was highway robbery since it went for $2800. Betabeat reported that some "sneered at the high price tag for a language that many learn on their own." But whatever controversy there might have been, the course was well-received and sold out. With any luck, more Ruby experts will take the curriculum and run with it.