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There are less than 12 hours left on our awesome deal for the Ruby programming course. Head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to check it out

What do Groupon, Twitter, Hulu, and 37 Signals all have in common? They all use the incredibly powerful, dynamic, and highly scalable programming language of Ruby or Ruby on Rails. Why is that supposed to get your heart fluttering? Because this language is the future of the web. Not being a developer myself, I shamelessly Googled to find out why Ruby on Rails is such a popular language/framework and I came across a Quora post from Ian MacLeod that sums it up nicely:

1. The Ruby community moves quickly, adopting new technologies and patterns – and refactoring or throwing out the old. Programmers love being on the cutting-edge.

2. Ruby seems to be one of those languages that maps well to a developer’s mental model. It’s frequently mentioned as one of a few languages that developers find a joy to code in.

3. Ruby is one of the major languages that promotes widespread use of “language magic” to createeasily-readable DSLs. This makes it very easy for casual developers to learn the language.

So, whether you want to start your company or just lock-in job security for the rest of your life…this tutorial is where it all starts.

With more than 27 step-by-step video lectures, this Ruby Programming course is only $79 (normally its 3x that much…and well worth it) and will teach you the ten steps to creating your first web app.

Rather than bog you down with a lot of theory, this course takes a hands-on approach and focuses on making you productive from day one!

With more than 30 brain-busting years of experience your instructor Hue Collingbourne literally wrote the book on Ruby programming. Whether you’re new to programming or just new to Ruby, he’ll be your perfect guide to rapid, real-world software development with this unique and elegant language.

We’re taking this one a step further. In addition to the 27 video lectures, here’s what you get with Huw’s course:

• Free eBook – The Little Book of Ruby and exclusive discount for The (Big) Book of Ruby
• Downloadable source codes and sample test files to compliment lectures
• 5 extra videos detailing Ruby on Rails, Symbols, Recursion, and other challenges

To learn more about this incredible Ruby Programming package head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to get the full scoop on all the course details.

• Only 12 Hours Left to Learn How To Make the World’s Next Great Website with Cult of Mac’s Latest Video Course [Deals]
• Learn How To Build A Great HTML5 Website With Our Latest Tutorial [Deals]
• Designer/Developer Bundle Giveaway – Win $450 Worth Of Cult Of Mac Video Tutorials!
• Stanford Offers Its Popular iPhone And iPad App Development Course For Free On iTunes U
• Apple Publishes Six Free Electronic Books for Developers

Our HTML5 Crash Course has less than 14 hours left before the deal expires! Get it now before it’s gone.

Is one of your New Years Resolutions to build a website? Well our newest deal is here to help you achieve your web development goals. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, founder, dev ninja, creative, or web geek, this HTML5 Crash Course will only help you enhance those skills to get after your next BIG idea or project in 2012. With more than 3 hours of detailed instruction you can’t go wrong with this expert course taught by Robin Nixon, author of Learning PHP, MySQL and JavaScript – one of the most POPULAR books on web development worldwide for over two years.

Learn everything you need to know about HTML5 and how to use it with this highly informative and popular course, already taken by over 1,000 people. Learn the tricks on how to use the power of HTML5 to create highly dynamic websites.

And because it starts with the first principles of HTML, you need no prior knowledge of the subject.

These days success relies on a certain couple criteria: imagination, implementation, and execution. Let’s be honest; how many times have you come up with a stellar idea but have no idea where to take it or for that matter, don’t want to go pay someone else $10,000 to build out a website all so you can simply communicate your idea to the world?

What if you had the power to get your ideas to the web without the reliance of that unknown someone? Yeah, life would be different, wouldn’t it? If you don’t believe me, look at Hsieh, Zuckerberg, and the rest of today’s Internet superstars because it seems like they/re doing all right.The power of an idea and being able to bring it to the worldwide holy land is astronomical. I know what you’re thinking… if only I knew how to do it – well, guess what? Here’s your shot.

HTML5 is the latest and greatest way to get your imagination to the web so if you’ve wanted to learn it pull the trigger and fire away; if not, simply walk away. It’s as easy as that.

Material that’s included:

• 15 lectures introducing HTML for newcomers
• 15 lectures on accessing the HTML5 canvas for drawing
• 6 lectures on using geolocation, local storage & advanced forms
• 4 lectures on embedding HTML5 audio & video
• 2 lectures introducing microdata, web workers and offline web apps
• Over 3 hours of online lectures
• And much more…

Who should attend this course?:

• Anyone who wishes to learn web development
• Existing webmasters who need to add to their skills
• Developers interested in learning the basics of HTML5 and JavaScript
• Anyone who needs to learn everything HTML5 has to offer

If you’re interested in learning how to build websites in HTML5, head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to take advantage of this latest offering now before it’s gone.

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• Stanford Offers Its Popular iPhone And iPad App Development Course For Free On iTunes U
• Win a Free CSS & HTML Course From Cult of Mac [Giveaway]

The iPad today is used in a lot of places that would surprise most people who regarded the thing as “just a big iPod touch” back when it debuted in early 2010: in corporate offices, in hospitals, in church pulpits, airline cockpits, and more. As sales continue to skyrocket, it’s becoming even more clear that another knock on the iPad, that it’s mainly a “consumption device” and not really for creation of content, is also becoming, well, inaccurate.

My favorite example of this came to me by way of Phillip Alvelda. Tech folks know him as the founder and former CEO of MobiTV. But his latest passion is his foundation, the Westminster Institute for Science Education. Through it, one of the courses he teaches is basic programming for middle schoolers. And what is he using for his course ? The iPad.

After his time at MIT, CalTech, NASA and in the tech startup world, Alvelda is now tackling the decline of science in schools’ elementary, middle- and high-school curriculum. What kids are currently taught does not “have much to do with what science is actually like,” Alvelda tells me. “It’s more about history of science and other people’s ideas.”

His foundation’s philosophy is to teach young people the power of creative exploration using 21st century tools. The class he teaches uses the iPad (a 21st century digital tool that’s far cheaper than anything most schools can afford of similar capability, he says) and an app called Codea. The app enables the creation of games and projects right on the device using the Lua programming language. (See video below for example.) Alvelda (who has no affiliation with Codea) calls it “a completely powerful and self-contained programming environment” that he says is great for teaching simple programming, something he considers essential for them when they eventually become working adults.

Codea, which first hit Apple’s App Store in October for $7.99, was created by Simeon Nasilowski, a programmer living in Adelaide, Australia who says he started designing the app never imagining it would be used in an educational setting, much less anyone else even seeing it.

He’s a mobile app developer by trade, but built Codea for himself because, he says, he wanted to write a bit of code but didn’t have his laptop on him. Most of the time, if he was away from his desk and inspiration stuck, all he’d have on him was his iPad.

But it wasn’t just about convenience for Nasilowski either. He also believes in touch as a fantastic interaction mode for programming for its ability to simplify the sometimes needlessly complicated. An example, cited by Nasilowski:

When you write code you could try to define a color as three values, red, green and blue with values between 0 and 255. You might type “120″ and that’s some sort of gray. In Codea, if you have a function or part of your code that requires a color, it highlights that part of the code and it pops up a color picker you choose from there.

That simplicity and ease of interaction is what makes this app and a tool like the iPad so appealing to Alvelda and other forward-thinking educators. The iPad is a cheap, simple way to teach programming, the potential lingua franca of the future. Plus, you don’t need a developer license or a lot of money. But despite all the possibility and promise of that, Apple’s stance on certain kinds of coding apps is working against this goal.

Codea did make it through the App Store verification process — Apple somewhat relaxed rules last year that stated apps cannot contain any non-Apple executable code. Now the rule limits only downloadable executable code. Other coding apps have been approved too, like Textastic, For: i and Koder.

Codea has seen 25,000 downloads since October, but just last week Apple contacted Nasilowski and had him take out the code-sharing feature of his app. A disappointment for sure. It’s not just Codea though. A more high-profile kerfuffle happened in 2010 when Apple rejected Scratch, a well-liked programming app for kids created by MIT’s Media Lab. The reason it was rejected was under the former rules — that have since been relaxed — that banned any executable code that wasn’t Apple’s.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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So you wanna be the next Zuckerberg, eh? But, let me guess, you’re a “business guy” who doesn’t know how to program? You’ve thought about it, but you don’t even know where to start, or you just “don’t have time”. Stay on this path and you may end up finding yourself seeking out a code monkey! Trust us, nobody wants that.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re going to help you out by introducing you to the HTML/CSS guru himself, Mark Lassoff. The man is energetic, skilled, and a dynamic online presenter; plus, he’s provided programming instruction to some of America’s largest corporations.

This course is a stellar opportunity to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS you need in order to whip up that creative, high-quality website you’ve been mulling over for years! Normally this course costs $49, but we negotiated a sweet deal with Mark. For only $29, you’ll get Mark’s HTML and CSS expertise jam-packed into nearly 4 hours of video instruction that includes highlighted lab exercises, so you can apply the very skills taught from the course.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• The HTML Document Structure For HTML 4.01, XHTML and HTML 5
• Text Markup
• CSS Typography
• HTML Lists
• Internal, External and Anchor Links
• Displaying and Styling Images
• HTML Forms
• CSS Box Model and Layout
• And much more…

Who should attend this course?

• People who want to better manage their web site
• People who want to become web designers and developers
• Designers who want to expand their skill sets
• Business owners who want to be more efficient with WordPress, Joomla or other CMS systems
• Students

About your instructor:

Mark Lassoff is the founder of LearnToProgram.tv – a leading corporate technical training firm. LearnToProgram.tv provides training for software, web and mobile developers worldwide. Their courses have taken place at Fortune 500 companies, training centers and Federal Government organizations. Now – here, you can experience the same great instruction that you get in one of Lassoff’s classroom sessions, at a small fraction of the price.

How long can you access your online lectures?

INDEFINITELY! As long as you have online access, you’ll be able to access them from anywhere. You can also download the videos to your computer to access them offline

There’s only 16 hours left on this deal so head over to Deals.CultofMac.com to learn more about the course, or make a purchase before this deal expires.

• Deals.CultofMac’s Discounted Photoshop Tutorial Course Ends in 16 Hours [Deals]
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• Learn How to Make Great Product Demo Videos with Cult of Mac’s Creation Course Deal
• Win a Free CSS & HTML Course From Cult of Mac [Giveaway]
• Is Adobe Beginning to Accept the Demise of Flash With New HTML5 Tool?

It’s been a great week for giveaways on Cult of Mac, but we’re not done quite yet. As our last giveaway of the week, we’ll be selecting 2 winners who will receive a free copy of the HTML and CSS for Beginners Course that we’re currently peddling over at deals.cultofmac.com. If you’ve been wanting to build a website but don’t know how then this is the giveaway you want to win.

This course is a stellar opportunity to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS you need in order to whip up that creative, high-quality website you’ve been mulling over for years! Two lucky winners will get the $29 course for free and will receive Mark’s HTML and CSS expertise jam-packed into nearly 4 hours of video instruction that includes highlighted lab exercises, so you can apply the very skills taught from the course. For this giveaway we’re going to do things a little differently and give you a few options for entry.

Here’s how to enter the giveaway:

Option 1: Follow Cult of Mac on Twitter and then ReTweet any news story from this week and include the tag  ”#iLoveCultofMac”

Option 2: Like Cult of Mac on Facebook and “like” any story on our wall.

Super easy, and you get to choose which social network you want to enter from.

The contest ends on Sunday, December 18th at 8PM PST, after which we will select be 2 winners.

Best of luck. 

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As i am a web application developer, lot’s of time i have to work with css. And right now i am using CSSEdit , it’s simple amazing. It’s now giving 100% satisfaction, because here i can work even on live site with it’s own preview option. I can change the little thing and get the preview without any single page refresh. not only that, it also giving me the option to select/change the properties with mouse click. Tomorrow i will make some changes on this theme (right now we are using), of-course i will take help of CSSEdit.

I think it’s the best css editor on mac . If you are not agree with me, you can also tell your favourite css editors name.

Only bad is , it’s not open source