Madison Area Technical College teaches Ruby on Rails

There are tree tell-tale signs technology has gone mainstream. One, books are selling and new books are being written. Ruby and Rails books have done very well. “Agile Web Development with Rails” won the Jolt award for the best technical book and Dave Thomas is hard at work on the second edition of the book that will ship immanently. I bought a beta copy and I really like what I see. I also liked Bruce Tate’s book “From Java to Ruby Things Every Manager Should Know”. I think I fit the target audience for this book. There are half a dozen or so major publishers getting Ruby and Rails books ready.

The second sign is conference attendance. Ruby and Rails conferences this year have sold out in record time. IBM sponsored this year’s RailsConf and introduced Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails. This was a great conference by the way. These conferences are for people who have already discovered Ruby and Rails. What is likely be more surprising to some people is that IBM DB2 conferences are now featuring Ruby on Rails. These conferences are targeting IT professionals in some of the largest enterprises, no social networking start-ups here. I will be presenting two one-hour sessions at the IDUG Europe in Vienna. We are also going to have a booth highlighting DB2 on Rails at the Information on Demand conference in Anaheim in October.

Last but not least, colleges and universities are offering courses on the subject. This article in Wisconsin Technology Network gives a good summary of the momentum behind Ruby on Rails and talks about the new Ruby on Rails class Eric Knapp is teaching at the Madison Area Technical College. According to the article Eric filled this class to capacity with little or no marketing. When classes for previously unknown technologies fill up just by the word of mouth, we can safely say that that technology has reached the mainstream.