Creating passionate conference attendees

How many of you have been to a conference (or a class, even) that you weren't really prepared for? Where you were lost half the time and didn't get nearly as much out of it as you might have? This describes me at the 1997 JavaOne, where I showed up having coded no more than Hello World in the Java language. (And only on someone else's machine.)

So, wouldn't it be great if a technical conference had, say, a one-day pre-conference session that was a crash course in "how to get the most from the conference"? And some shows do that... but you have to fork over still more money on top of the conference fees.

So, wouldn't it be great if a technical conference offered the one-day prep session, and asked for nothing more than a donation to one of several well-respected, well-researched charities?

Leave it to the smart and loveable Pragmatic guys to do exactly that for the upcoming Rails Conference. Details
of how the "guidebook" (that's what they're calling the how-to-kick-ass-at-the-conference thing) are here, and the day-long session is even taught by two of THE nicest guys in the tech business (and I don't say that lightly), Dave Thomas:

and Mike Clark:

What a terrific way to make sure conference attendees have a high resolution user experience, while also doing some real good. And it's no surprise that the Pragmatic folks have more passionate users than perhaps any other tech book publisher. Let me put it this way, in an effort to support this young publishing company, loyal readers will often go to their site to buy direct--which means paying more for the books than they'd pay on Amazon.

The conference itself sounds great -- with a lineup that includes Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, Paul Graham, and Martin Fowler.

FYI - it's worth checking out that Hello World site I linked to at the top of this post. It's got "Hello World" coded in over 190 different languages--everything from Python to Prolog. Even if you're not a programmer, it gives you a sense of the different programming languages. The Ruby version, for example, looks a lot more fun and easy:
puts "Hello World!"

than, say, cobol:

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300 DATE-WRITTEN. 02/05/96 21:04.
000400* AUTHOR BRIAN COLLINS
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 DISPLAY "HELLO, WORLD." LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600 STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800 EXIT.


(OK, that wasn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, but I take artistic/programmer license)

Thanks Chad Fowler for letting me know about the "Guidebook" thing.

(And another p.s. -- I'm now only 90 days behind in emails, so... I'm catching up! If you're waiting, I haven't forgotten you.)