Finishing up the Ruby on Rails Course

I've spent all weekend tweaking and polishing (and adding and editing) the Ruby on Rails course material (and exercises) for my upcoming Ruby on Rails Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch. This course is sure to be a hit, as it is a) taught by moi, b) practical and down to earth, and c) mixed in with some real-live honest-to-goodness examples from in the trenches.

Often times, course work or examples will use the occasional "foo" or "bar" variables, a sort-of inside joke among programmers, that, to be honest, I never quite got. Yes, yes, I know, FUBAR is the acronym for Messed Up Beyond All Repair, but I just don't get it. That's why I'm on a mission to remove this from the hacker repetoire, and only provide real examples with at least a semblance of real-word-ality. Well, I actually do enjoy a good Lindsey Lohan reference or two and my course is chock full of 'em:

@user = User.find :first,
  :conditions => [‘age < ?’, 21] @user.first_name # => “Lindsey”
@user.age        # => 21

I'm getting geared up and ready with my tricked out Keynote slides, movie demonstrations, and plenty of real-world project code that's a QuickSilver shortcut away.