Safari Books is a pay-site that allows you to "check out" technical books up to a certain limit.

Every one in our group has an account, and we love it.

Unfortunately, the site, which O'Reilly runs, suffered from horrible usability issues.

Basically, they overdosed on Ajax, Ajaxifingy everything from search to flipping pages. Interestingly, the site used classical techniques for things that could have benefited from Ajax such as sign in and adding books to your self.

The new interfaced made searching and browsing for books a lot easier, but reading an individual book is still a chore and referring back to a specific spot in a book still requires an advanced degree.

And how about a social aspect to the site? I'd like to know what others are reading and see a break down of categories.

Still, it's a great site, and I'll continue to use it.

I've recently been tearing through various video tutorials that are out there including the ones produced by the fine folks over at railscasts.com.

A recent favorite that I've watched and implemented on Fan Profiles is the one about Site Wide Announcements. This is something that is pretty essential to any growing online community. Sooner or later you're going to want to message all your users about something, whether it be scheduled maintenance, new features, or other bits of info that may be relevant to the community as a whole.

One of the many cool projects that we've been working on is a killer new game available on Facebook. It's call Fight for the Top and it's probably the best Facebook sports app evar.

Today we launched the announcement system and have more than doubled the number of Fight for the Top users we had prior to today in a short few hours. We haven't done any promo for the app up to this point and it hasn't been available for very long but it was nice to see that the announcement system had an immediate effect on its user base.

I made a few tweaks to fit the code that Ryan covers in his screencast to make it work within Fan Profiles but for the most part kept it pretty much the same. Another great thing about these screencasts is that many others from the community offer up their input and/or improvements in the comments section. In this episode there was some good stuff added to railsforum.com and geoff.evason.name that is worth a look. In particular, the Geoff Evanson tips included using a cookie to track wheather a message has been hidden instead of a session which I found to be handy.

Like many web developers I am largely self taught. The web is full of endless resources and anyone with an internet connection and Google can more or less figure anything out.

Having said that, it often times does help to have a course provide structure as a guideline to your learning. I found a course that is online and free to anyone that wants to learn the basics of Ruby.

You can find it here: http://www.rubylearning.org/class/

You can also check out the notes here: http://rubylearning.com/satishtalim/tutorial.html

I haven't taken a computer science course in over a decade so this course helped get me back to the fundamentals of programming and specifically how they relate to the world of Ruby.

The individual that puts the course together has an active twitter account and is easily accessible on the course message boards and via email.

I've been going through the many resources I've used over the past several months to get up to speed on RoR and will start posting more of them here on this blog going forward.