If you’re a web developer, you’re probably well aware that at the moment Ruby on Rails  hot, hot, hot.

In fact, its one of the hottest skills on the market right now.

Couple it with the fact that Boston always was one the premier center of IT innovations in US and you’d think that learning options would be endless.

The reality is that options are few, far and in between, but the good news is that the number of startups ready to take on the task is growing.

In part 1 of this post, I’ll profile RoR intro course from General Assembly and RoR apprenticeship program run by Thoughtbot.

General Assembly

Course name: Intro to Rails

Cost: $3,000

When: February 25 to  April 17 (Mondays/Wednesday – 6pm : 9pm)

GA was initially based in New York, but recently expanded to numerous other cities, including Boston.

This particular course will run for 8 weeks and promises to teach fundamentals of Ruby (object-orientation, reusing code, exception handling) and RoR (creating multi-model associations, validating form input and more).

Check out more details here.

Thoughtbot

Program name: apprentice.io

As name states, this is an apprenticeship program which runs for three months, the apprentices selected for the program will be paid $500 a week!

Of course, there always the caveat…the program is very competitive (you have to demonstrate your RoR skills beforehand), requires a significant investment of time (40 hours a week), but it also promises that you’ll learn and work not only with Ruby on Rails, but also HTML5, Backbone.js, jQuery and other cutting-edge technologies.

Note – apparently, when the program similar to the one currently run by GA in Boston started out in New York, many developers were enraged by a hefty price tag of $2,800 (as reported by Betabeat and Dice).

Over to you – do you think that $3,000 tag is appropriate price for an introductory course to Ruby on Rails?