Pragmatic Screencasts Debut

In another launch of a new product today, Mike Clark and the rest of my friends over at the Pragmatic Programmers have launched Pragmatic Screencasts with four screencast series covering a range of topics: Expression Engine, Core Animation, Erlang, and Active Record. Each series has several episodes ready to go with more to come.

So far, I've checked out a bit of the Expression Engine and Core Animation screencasts, both in full-sized and iPod/iPhone sized video. Both levels of resolution are nice and easy to follow along and the quality of the videos is nicely done, which is important when you're reading along with what the author is typing. Here's a grab from Ryan Irelan's Expression Engine Episode 1 in iPod/iPhone size:

The full size videos are even better. It's actually really hard to tell that you're watching a movie instead of letting the narrator drive your own screen.

The best part of these new screencasts, other than their content of course, is that the entire process of buying and downloading the videos is integrated into the same infrastructure that the Pragmatic Programmers use for their PDF eBooks. Just as you can download new PDFs of your books at any time, you can jump into your account page and grab the screencast episodes that you've purchased. Here's a grab from my own bookshelf showing the screencasts alongside my PDF books:

This kind of smooth integration is one of those things that's obvious when you see it, but it's the result of somebody thinking things through and doing the leg work to make it work nice and smoothly. Congrats Mike and Dave for getting this out the door. And congrats to Ryan Irelan, Bill Dudney, Kevin Smith, and Ryan Bates for their first screencast episodes. This stuff is a lot of hard work and you guys should be proud.