Relax, have fun and Play.. er Learn

Relax Play and Learn is the new mantra.. at least in learning Rails and related web tools used for development.
Maybe its just me, but over the past few days, I am increasingly finding newer and diverse forms of learning web development, especially using advanced frameworks like rails.
Some of these are directed at learning inter-spread with videos that users can learn at their own pace like the rails for zombies and others that focus on user provided content created by users themselves. Then, there are language specific courses like http://www.rubylearning.com .
When I started learning rails, how much I wish that I had access to similar resources as these are godsend for learners; they serve the dual purpose of ease in learning as well as enjoyment for beginners.
As I write this post, I am also casually looking at various websites like peepcode.com that offer much higher quality screen casts than railscasts.com especially for beginners.
What is surprising is that other technologies do not have this type of support, but web application development centered around rails, scripting languages and HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery combined are increasingly finding this support. One can only hope that this type of open and user friendly learning increases its umbrella and allows more technologies into its fold in the near future.

So If you are a beginner or are considering using rails, my humble advice to you is to bookmark these and start when you have some extra/free time.

Playing with Asp.net Mvc3

I have known this framework since its launch of second iteration and did not try it as it never appealed to me to the extent that I switched from rails into it. But today, I decided  to give this revamped framework a go - since so much has been talked about this in the .net crowd, a customer at work preferred its usage over silverlight (on which we were displaying our appliciations till now).
Out of box, this framework does not appeals per se, but given the amount of documentation and the availability to plug-in only the desired element (an open ended approach) in the architecture, this seemed to me as a mixed bag - moving .net developers away from that design-oriented into a code-oriented (I have always considered Razor to be loosely based on velocity) programming, but still not supporting third party frameworks (unlike various jee/spring applications where we can mix and drop different components into different tiers).
Scaffolding was also missing surprisingly from this rails offshoot, but I enabled this through another extra tool .
Now that I am done with basic scaffolding and T4 templates, I am on my way to discover more about this framework and its highlights and limitations over this weekend.