This week the railsenvy guys released their very first screencast. They’ve got weekly podcast, delivering news on the ruby/rails community. It’s pretty good. If you like banter and sound clips, you’ll enjoy it.

Their first screencast is titled Advanced Active Record, covering the following:

• Loading large data sets
• Using indexes
• Caching
• Named Scope
• STI & Polymorphic Associations
• Dirty Objects

They take a different approach from the typical screencasts I’ve seen with rails. Normally screencasts involve someone typing away in Textmate, switching over to the terminal, and then showing a demo in Firefox. Instead, they’ve taken the greenscreen approach. Code is displayed in the background, with Jason and Gregg popping in and out of the forefront to explain things. There’s plenty of charts and diagrams too. I really like this approach. To me, it’s more exciting to see things come across the screen with a person pointing at them. If you’re afraid these are like typical powerpoint presentations, don’t be. These guys do a good job of explaining how each of the concepts work, showing snippets, and examining log files so you don’t have to drown in some of the gigantic SQL that’s generated by ActiveRecord. There’s also examples of what’s new in Rails 2.1, including dirty objects and how partial updates work.

So if you want to learn some of the more advanced active record topics, check it out.