I’d appreciate it if you would post any improvements or enhancements in the comments.

Thanks

@Lutz: Yes, I planned to talk about Modules and Mixins at the end or perhaps if it comes up during “Classes and Instances”. I think the experience of the audience will determine how much I will talk about closures. I don’t know if it is possible to appreciate them with little programming experience (this is one area where I am still looking for a good and simple exercise)

@Mr. Neighborly: The audience for my other courses (Java and Perl) were students learning to program and people working in software development adding another language to their toolbox. I hope this time it will be similar. I will talk about Duck typing (can you teach Ruby without?) but I’m not sure about metaprogramming and open classes. I don’t think there will be enough time left to talk about Ruby libraries, so I think I will just point to ruby-doc or the online version of the Pickaxe book and tell them how to include them in their code.

If I could make a suggestion, it would maybe be that you could tack on some library instruction that covers important libraries like Thread and the Net libraries, or if you didn’t want to go that route, the GUI toolkits may be a good topic also.

As for examples, what audience are you targeting primarily? If you’re targeting people from a static language audience, maybe you could show off some of Ruby’s dynamic features (duck typing, metaprogramming, open classes, etc.), or, if you’re targeting other dynamic language users, perhaps you could show off Ruby’s expressive and powerful syntax with closures and some segments of metaprogramming.

Good luck; if you want to bounce any ideas off of me, feel free to e-mail.