Over the years, Sun technology evangelist Sang Shin's free online courses on Java technology and other programming topics, which typically last between four to five months, have elicited many kudos. Forthcoming is a course on Ruby, JRuby, and Rails programming, which will cover topics on the basics, metaprogramming, deployment, related Web technologies, and so forth. Hands-on labs, including Rails applications built on the NetBeans IDE, accompany the course. A class email alias offers a forum for Q&As.Registration takes only one step: Just send a blank email message to the subscription alias specified on the site. The first session will start on July 15.

Interested? Sign up pronto.