I recently completed the Ruby on Rails tutorial “Rails for Zombies.” I really like it’s “edutainment” zombie filled format, and on top of that it’s a very well written and easy to follow tutorial.

The tutorial consists of five “chapters.” Each chapter is broken up into an approximately 10 minute video and then a lab portion where you get to do exercises related to the video.  It’s really great to try out the code right after hearing about it, and I like that it doesn’t get drearily technical at the get go with needing to get Rails up and running.  A lot of RoR tutorials start with installing and runing your own local server, which a least for me is the least pleasant part.

A nice take away is the free PDF download it offers, which has all the slides from the video and is a nice reference back to everything you learned from the tutorial.  You also get a coupon for some paid rails tutorials after you finish.  They have “Rails for Zombies 2″ in the works so I’m thinking of saving it for that :3

At their Code School website they also offer a “Rails best practices” class which sounds a little advanced for diving into right after Rails for Zombies, but if it’s anywhere as well put together as Rails for Zombies I’d like to come back to it later.

http://railsforzombies.org/

From my experience Photoshop’s “Save for web and devices” will give you the biggest bang for your buck.  It’ll give you the lowest file sizes with the least amount of artifacts.

However, one problem I had is that it’s difficult to resize a lot of images in bulk.  Especially if you want to compress images in sub directories.  After a lot of searching I came across this useful little snippet.  One thing – it’s only meant for .JPGs.  So any other format and you won’t be finding this so useful…but it might not be too hard to tweak.

To use this first download the script on your computer and open Photoshop.  Go to file>scripts>browse, select the script, then select the folder containing you .JPG images.

You can edit the file in notepad, dreamweaver, whatever.  To change to quality edit this line:
SaveForWeb(saveFile,90); // set quality to suit
Where 90 refers to the quality setting.

I also did some editing to this so it would also resize images before compressing them.  First find the line:
app.preferences.typeUnits = TypeUnits.PIXELS;
After it add:
doc.resizeImage(200, 133);
where 200,133 is the image size.  I think I did have some issues with stretching so check the aspect ratio beforehand.

Download the script here