[lazyGeneral]

When I learned Rails, I was also learning Ruby. (This was 6 months ago.) (As a matter of fact I was learning what programming really was...)

Learning MiniTest/Test::Unit first I would say is a much better approach because you get to focus on the language, which is at the end of the day, the reason Rails is so special.

I read somewhere that someone decided to teach Rspec because it had "less" metaprogramming than a Test::Unit definition.

But in retrospect, it may have been really easy to begin grokking metaprogramming if we had explained that naming something:

   class UserTest < TestUnit::TestCase

would end up looking for the User class because of the way it was written. (I believe Rspec does something like this as well but because it deviates from Ruby...it's harder to explain.)

[cglee]

I should mention that in our 3-course program, we teach Ruby first. See http://www.gotealeaf.com