We are excited to announce we are starting our Tech Masterclass series with what we believe is an interesting way to learn. The first will be “Rails for Beginners” Tech Masterclass followed by a Hackathon to try out what you have learned.Tech Masterclass GuruJeremy Chatfield has been a programmer for more than 30 years, working on dating systems, the UNIX kernel, Interactive Voice Response services, word processors, manufacturing systems, and B2B and B2C websites in a range of programming languages. He has also been a University lecturer, a serial co-founder and serial CTO. He built his first commercial website in May 1994, using a mix of shell and awk scripts, and has since used Java, PHP, Perl, Python and RoR for sites for his own businesses and for clients. He's also been an expert witness for a trial involving paid search and SEO and has been a Google recognised AdWords Help Forum Top Contributor. What does it involve?* What is Rails?* Dev environment - Ruby Version Management & alternatives* MVC 2 & REST review* Creating a First App* Convention Over Configuration* Using Git - version control system* Pushing the App live on Heroku* Package Management and Gems* Active Scaffolding for Rapid Prototyping* Hobo - making a second app with more complex relations and actionsThe goal:Take web developers who are not familiar with Rails to a level where they can start developing applications, with fast prototyping. With only light coverage of Ruby, this course will focus more on why and how Rails is an interesting platform for development and how it can be highly productive. You won't need much Ruby, so long as you don't do a lot of business logic - and Ruby can be picked up fairly quickly by anyone with scripting and Object Oriented Programming skills.What you’ll need:* Your laptop, preferably with Ruby and Git already installed* GitHub account with your public/private key set up* free Heroku account* text editor that you can use for programming - we won't be wanting or needing an IDE for this course; Rails coders often use TextMate on MacWe'll give you resources to install and set up those tools a few weeks before the course.All details can be found at our Masterclass / Rails for Beginners Forum: "techmeetups".