Good learning-by-doing projects?

Ruby
1

Hello all,

I’m fairly new to ruby coming from some Java.
I’ve been reading “The pragmatic programmers guide”, which is pretty
good.
But, I always find it’s easier to learn the language using it, rather
than
just reading about it. (Naturally…)

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

Regards,

Søren Andersen

2

Søren Andersen wrote:

Hello all,

I’m fairly new to ruby coming from some Java.
I’ve been reading “The pragmatic programmers guide”, which is pretty
good.
But, I always find it’s easier to learn the language using it, rather
than
just reading about it. (Naturally…)

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

Regards,

Søren Andersen

Well, my first language was ruby, so I learned it by doing Rails stuff.
I wanted to make web-sites so I learned that way. I just recently
started learning Java, and what I have been doing is taking my ruby apps
and re-doing them in Java. you could try the opposite. I guess it just
depends on what you want to do with the language, but if your just
trying to learn it and do what ever, then you could try using hpricot
and start parsing some websites, or use one of the gui toolkits like
FXRuby. Have fun!

~Jeremy

3

On 29/10/2007, Søren Andersen [email protected] wrote:

Hello all,

I’m fairly new to ruby coming from some Java.
I’ve been reading “The pragmatic programmers guide”, which is pretty good.
But, I always find it’s easier to learn the language using it, rather than
just reading about it. (Naturally…)

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

This come up from time to time, and frankly, I never understood what
the question is asking. Programming is no more learning the idioms of
that language; the constructs behind it should be transferable across
languages.

Since you said you’ve used Java, see:

http://onestepback.org/articles/10things/

As for specific projects, that’s hard to answer. You could look at
the Ruby quizes:

www.rubyquiz.org

– Thomas A.

4

Hi –

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, Thomas A. wrote:

This come up from time to time, and frankly, I never understood what
the question is asking. Programming is no more learning the idioms of
that language; the constructs behind it should be transferable across
languages.

Then rephrase the question in your mind as: What are your favorite
learning-the-idioms-of-the-language-by-doing projects? :slight_smile: There’s
definitely something there to learn, and that means that there are
different approaches to, and experiences with, the process.

I actually think it’s possible to learn something about programming
from a particular programming language. I probably can’t come up
with a sound technical reason why that should be, but I believe it is.

David

5

Hi –

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, Søren Andersen wrote:

Hello all,

I’m fairly new to ruby coming from some Java.
I’ve been reading “The pragmatic programmers guide”, which is pretty good.
But, I always find it’s easier to learn the language using it, rather than
just reading about it. (Naturally…)

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

My “rite of passage” program for new languages is usually the
word-game Jotto. (Somewhere I have my Ruby version of it…) I find
game-ish things to be quite good for language-learning purposes. Not
necessarily full-blown video games and such, but things like decks of
cards, anagrams, and checker board moves.

The main thing is to keep it all a bit fluid – for instance, if
you’re doing a checker board, try it with arrays and also with the
Matrix class. It can be a good excuse for exploring the language and
trying things out.

David

6

On 10/29/07, Jeremy W. [email protected] wrote:

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

Regards,

Søren Andersen

Well, my first language was ruby, so I learned it by doing Rails stuff.
I wanted to make web-sites so I learned that way. I just recently
started learning Java, and what I have been doing is taking my ruby apps
and re-doing them in Java.
Downporting is good
you could try the opposite.
DO not do this, upporting is bad, you risk to write Java code in Ruby.
I can only repeat Thomas’ suggestion about Ruby Q.

Do a simple one, it is not your algorithmic muscles you want to flex,
right?, and than look at how Rubiests have done it.

Cheers
Robert

7

Hi –

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

just reading about it. (Naturally…)
The main thing is to keep it all a bit fluid – for instance, if
you’re doing a checker board, try it with arrays and also with the
Matrix class. It can be a good excuse for exploring the language and
trying things out.

David

You really want that “checkers” Ruby Q., don’t you? :wink:

That’s funny – I actually hadn’t even read that thread.

I wrote a Boggle game in Ruby once, and tried to generalize the
algorithm so that it could use a board of any size and calculate legal
letter paths. Not exactly the same as checkers, but similar in some
ways. With the standard-size board (4x4), it was literally true that
almost every case was an edge case.

David

8

David A. Black wrote:

than

The main thing is to keep it all a bit fluid – for instance, if
you’re doing a checker board, try it with arrays and also with the
Matrix class. It can be a good excuse for exploring the language and
trying things out.

David

You really want that “checkers” Ruby Q., don’t you? :wink:

When I was a (very) young person I wanted a computer. Of course this was
so long ago that people didn’t own computers, just businesses and
government agencies. And what did I want to do with it? Two things –
play games and predict the weather. It seems like there are many more
fun things to do these days, but the game thing must be pretty much
universal if it was something people wanted to do that long ago.

So … is anyone doing computational fluid dynamics in Ruby? :wink:

9

On Oct 29, 2007, at 8:37 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

So … is anyone doing computational fluid dynamics in Ruby? :wink:

There’s a company (Fluent) located in my town that does fluid
dynamics… in C… But they have many modules of their stuff in
Python. I spoke to one of the guys at my Linux Users Group meeting,
and he says they might start doing some modules in Ruby by next
year (I wanted to do some basic interning there, like systems
administration, dirty work, etc).

So in short… There’re some things in Python that may or may not be
open source, and then porting those to Ruby shouldn’t be too hard.

I’ll email the guy, and ask him about maybe releasing some of their
code :wink:

HTH,
~ Ari
English is like a pseudo-random number generator - there are a
bajillion rules to it, but nobody cares.

10

On Oct 29, 2007, at 4:46 PM, Søren Andersen wrote:

ruby-specific, and generally?
Learning by doing is good. So is reading the code others have
written. I, too, recommend Ruby Q. as a source of both projects to
do and code to browse.

<http://www.rubyquiz.com/
index.html> .

Regards, Morton

11

On 10/29/07, Ari B. [email protected] wrote:

But, I always find it’s easier to learn the language using it,
http://www.rubyquiz.com/index.html

Depending on how new you are to programming (as i am/was), try
starting out with FizzBuzz and Twisting a Rope.

The rope one was especially fun!

If you liked the rope one, you should try the current one - editing
text. I haven’t seen any solutions, yet. A “rope” could even be
used to solve it…

Eric

12

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

I believe that this is very much an “eye of the beholder” issue. You
should choose something that you find interesting enough to hold your
attention even when the going gets rough, which it always does when
learning. Have it large enough to do the things that you will want to
learn. (websites, databases, file I/O, sockets, etc, etc.)

Pick something that will become a cool toy you can play with and you
will want it to be all shiny and tricked out. It is your interest in
the project that will make the biggest difference in the learning
process.

IMHO

13

On Oct 29, 2007, at 9:21 PM, Morton G. wrote:

So - what are your favorite “learning-by-doing”-proejcts? Both
ruby-specific, and generally?

Learning by doing is good. So is reading the code others have
written. I, too, recommend Ruby Q. as a source of both projects
to do and code to browse.

http://www.rubyquiz.com/index.html

Depending on how new you are to programming (as i am/was), try
starting out with FizzBuzz and Twisting a Rope.

The rope one was especially fun!

Ari
-------------------------------------------|
Nietzsche is my copilot

14

On 10/30/07, Eric M. [email protected] wrote:

If you liked the rope one, you should try the current one - editing
text. I haven’t seen any solutions, yet.
Pitty it’s a great quiz and I would love to have the time… :frowning:

Robert