Introducing Learn Prime: Subscription access to everything we teach.

Today we’re happy to announce Learn Prime, a subscription service which gives you access to everything we teach. Your monthly $99 subscription gets you ongoing access to all of our books, screencasts, and even all our in-person and online workshops. Our workshops alone are normally over $1,000 when purchased individually!

In addition to our existing materials, we’ve created a new stream of articles only available to subscribers called Learn Bytes. We’ve already published Bytes on using subdomains in Rails, tricks for finding where a method is defined, and faking out a remote service using rack-test, with much more to come.

Subscribers also receive access to something we (humbly) consider the best resource of all: our team. Got a burning Ruby question? Need help testing something tricky? How about another set of eyes on a pull request? Head to our private Campfire room or send an email, and a thoughtbot developer will help you out.

Our goal is to create more great designers and developers. We hope this new subscription service makes our workshops and other learning materials available to even more people.

We’re are also introducing Prime for Teams. For $1999/month your entire team of up to 25 people can get access to everything provided by Prime. That’s less than the cost of your team’s daily pourovers! And for a limited time, as a special launch discount, the price for Prime for Teams is only $1299 per month!

We hope you’ll join the community of people who have already subscribed to Learn Prime. Find out more at Learn.

Our Intro to Ruby on Rails workshop is now available online

I’m very pleased announce that our popular Intro to Ruby on Rails workshop is now available to take as a month-long online version.

The online workshop will run from February 4th to March 1st. After that, you get ongoing support from the thoughtbot team for any Ruby on Rails questions you have.

Our online workshops have been going very well, and in this latest round we’ve switched from text-based Campfire chat for office hours to full audio and video in Google Hangouts.

Register today for the upcoming online session of Intro to Ruby on Rails.

Take an online Test-Driven Rails Workshop with thoughtbot

We’ve just opened registration for our new online Test-Driven Rails workshop, which starts Monday, November 26th, 2012.

The course is taught by Josh Clayton, the maintainer of FactoryGirl, shoulda contributor, and experienced Rails developer. Over the course of a month you will code two Rails applications alongside Josh, working directly with him to learn TDD or improving your TDD practice. This isn’t just a series of videos; it’s an online workshop where you work directly with Josh getting one-on-one and group support.

Because the workshop takes place over the course of an entire month, it strikes a nice balance between making a ton of progress and working at a pace that will work around your schedule. There will also be additional time throughout the week to explore the nooks and crannies of TDD, helped along by Josh and the rest of the thoughtbot team.

Furthermore, when you take an online workshop with thoughtbot, it doesn’t just stop after the initial month. You get ongoing support for any testing questions you may have in the future, from Josh and the rest of the thoughtbot team.

We’d love to have you take this course. You can sign up now and the course begins Monday, November 26th, 2012.

New: online thoughtbot workshops

Today, I’m happy to launch a new online version of our Design for Developers workshop.

We’ve been giving our workshops in Boston for over four years now, and we’ve since expanded them to our new San Francisco office. During that time, we’ve received requests from people around the world asking to take our workshops online. However, we did not want to offer our workshops online until we felt we’d achieved the same intensive, hands-on nature of the in-person version.

We think we’ve figured it out. Here’s how it works:

Instead of taking place in our office over two days, the online version takes place over the course of a month. You pick a project of your own. This can be anything from your personal site, to a side project, to something you’re working on at your job. Each week, we release a pre-recorded video on a design topic and give you a workshop to apply to your project. Throughout the week you work through the workshop, emailing us questions you have along the way. We then hold office hours via group chat, where we have a group critique of your work.

We believe that this hybrid approach will replicate the success of our in person workshop, and we’re excited to bring this to developers around the world.

We’d love to have you take this course. You can sign up now and the course begins Friday, November 2nd, 2012.