Effective Ruby LiveLessons is a video training course by Sam Phippen, based on the excellent Effective Ruby book written by Peter Jones (see my review of that book).

The lessons are split into 5 different videos of great quality covering more than 4 hours of training in total. The video lessons, much like the book covers practical advice that can make Ruby code more readable, less verbose, while at the same time being more expressive.

My favorite parts was the lessons on testing, which stresses ordering your test in Arrange - Act - Assert order (which is usually not possible while using spies, stubs or mocks) and the primer on using the Enumerable module and it’s many functions.

The videos also illustrate common uses for the Ruby Standard Library, like SimpleDelegator or Forwardable that are often overlooked by Ruby programmers.

I enjoyed the videos, even though I generally prefer books to videos: It’s easy for videos to either be too fast or too slow, whereas reading is always at a comfortable pace. In addition, when going back to already consumed material, it’s much easier to find a particular section in a book than it is in a video.

I would recommend the video to those how prefer that format over a book.