Are you loving your Code School experience and telling your friends about it? If so, we’re thrilled to hear it.
If you’d like to make a few bucks, we’ve got an affiliate program set up. Currently, we offer $15 for every sale that is made through your account.
Next Month’s Code School Course: Journey into Mobile
Jason Vanlue, lead designer at Envy Labs, is heads down on building our next course, which we’re calling Journey into Mobile. We’re as excited about the Steampunk style “vintage adventure” graphics (inspired by Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) as we are about the killer content.
This course will be covering:
If you care about building mobile websites, you won’t want to miss this.
Today we released our latest Code School course, Anatomy of Backbone.js to the public as a single purchase. (It’s free for members.)
Why should you try Backbone.js?
If you’re trying to build a sophisticated front-end for your browser-based application, jQuery is just not enough. That’s where Backbone.js comes in. In this course, Eric Allam & Gregg Pollack take you through all the major parts of Backbone.js— from Views and Models, to Collections, History, and the Router. We’ll take a look at what it’s like building with MVC with JavaScript.
You can start by playing the first level of the Backbone.js course for free. Continue in the levels to earn cool badges and prizes along the way, including $15 off Backbone.js on Rails and $10 off Recipes with Backbone.
Screenshot of Backbone.js: 
New Code TV Screencast: Getting Started with Clojure - Part 1
We’ve also got a great new Code TV screencast up for our members on Clojure from Craig Andera.
In part #1, we introduce Clojure: what it is, why you might want to use it, and how to install it. We also look at options for using Clojure that don’t require you to install anything at all!
For our most recent course release, The Anatomy of Backbone.js, we decided to put together a video to show you some behind the scenes footage and talk about how we put courses together. Enjoy:
The Making of the Anatomy of Backbone.js from Gregg Pollack on Vimeo.
Production of this video came from Unknown Media.
Code T.V.
This week, our own Olivier Lacan made a Code T.V. screencast on RVM.
Ruby Version Manager (or RVM) is a command-line tool which allows you to easily install, manage, and work with mulitple versions of Ruby and mulitple sets of Gems. Olivier walks you through the basics of RVM, giving you all the information needed to work with it effectively.
Try Ruby Updates
Additionally, we made a few updates to make TryRuby more intuitive and easy to understand. These copy changes and explanations will help our users to know when to move on to the “next” area.
Some Nice Press
We were featured in the Huffington Post this week! Thanks Jaime Tolentino for this great article. It’s nice to hear a newbie explain their experience with Code School. Can’t wait for the follow-up piece.
Just for Fun
Also, if you’ve been wondering what the folks at Code School do when they’re not thinking up new courses for you, this week we tried cooking.
Stay on the lookout for our Backbone.js course. It’s coming to you in the very near future.
If you look on our course request page, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of people asking for a Backbone.js course. In response to this, Eric Allam and Gregg Pollack have been working hard on the content for a Backbone.js course these past few weeks, due to release in March.
Get ready, this new course will cover everything you need to know from Models and Views to Routing, all which will help you keep your client side javascript more organized.
Unsure about how to do testing in Rails or just want to solidify your testing knowledge? Rails Testing for Zombies has arrived. This course picks up where Rails for Zombies 2 left off, adding tests to our Twitter for Zombies application.
In this course we cover:
Testing should be fun if you’re doing it right, and testing with zombies… now that’s a graveyard party waiting to happen.
This course is currently released to Code School members and to the public as a single-purchase.
Many of you have been clamoring for it, so we now have video downloads of all courses available on Code School today. Simply go any level and you will see a “Download Video” link on the video page for each level.
This will allow you to watch the videos on the side while you’re going through challenges or simply keep them around for later reference if you want a quick refresher.
Our topic this week is Refinery — a flexible and easily extendible Rails CMS that remains very accessible to an end user.
In this episode, our own Josh Van Cleef walks you through setting up and customizing a Refinery app from the beginning.
In case you missed it, last week’s Code TV was on Shell Productivity. In this episode, Jay McGavren shared some of his favorite tricks for working in the shell. No unreadable sed or awk scripts here. Just simple, solid tips you can use every day, including time savers with find, less, ssh, and command-line Ruby.
Are you loving your Code School experience and telling your friends about it? If so, we’re thrilled to hear it.
Why not make a few bucks in the process? We’ve got an affiliate program set up. Currently, we offer $15 for every sale that is made through your account.
Code School is all about learning by doing. Our educational courses combine video, coding in the browser, and gamification principles to make learning more fun and therefore more effective. A typical course contains 5 levels, each with a 10-15 minute video, followed by series of code challenges a student must solve to make it to the next level. Once finished each course provides rewards for completion. Code School is a product of Envy Labs.
