@tenderlove asked "Is it good to teach RSpec (vs t/u) to people who are totally new to Ruby?" I have experience suggesting that it is a good thing; after a short back and forth, it seemed useful to write it up in detail.
This goes back several years, to when I was the primary Ruby/Rails trainer for Relevance from 2006-2009. I'm guessing that worked out to probably 6-8 classes a year during those years. Since then, RSpec has changed a fair amount (with the addition of expect) and test/unit has changed radically (it has an entirely new implementation, minitest, that avoids some of the inconsistencies that made test/unit a bit confusing during the time I'm writing about here).
I started out as an RSpec skeptic. I've never been afraid of what a lot of people denigrate as "magic" in Ruby libraries … to me, if you take the trouble to understand it, that stuff's just pr