Hi 
I’ve been learning and practicing ruby for 2 weeks and a half and I’m
wondering now as to how much longer it’ll take before I complete ruby.
If definite, please let me know how long it takes to learn ruby on the
average.
I also want to finish as early as possible 'cos I want to start with
ruby on rails as soon as possible.
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Samuel M. [email protected]
wrote:
I’ve been learning and practicing ruby for 2 weeks and a half and I’m
wondering now as to how much longer it’ll take before I complete ruby.
If definite, please let me know how long it takes to learn ruby on the
average.
I also want to finish as early as possible 'cos I want to start with
ruby on rails as soon as possible.
Well, the answer depends on a lot of factors
- What do you mean by “complete”? Mastery of anything usually takes
much longer than is needed for sound understanding. - How much knowledge did you have before about
- programming in general
- object oriented programming
- OOA and OOD
- How much experience do you have in other programming languages?
The way you pose your question makes me assume that it will take you
rather longer to reach your goal than shorter. A programming language
is in some ways similar to a natural language: you can learn the
vocabulary pretty quickly and easily but the ability to read, write,
understand and speak the language takes considerably more effort.
Kind regards
robert
What do you mean by “complete”?
I meant complete being able to master it. I had given myself a time
frame of 6 months to be able to achieve this but not sure if it is right
to restrict myself that way or a good thing push me to do more. At the
moment, I don’t even know if the 6 months is even maybe too much.
- How much knowledge did you have before about
- programming in general
- object oriented programming
- OOA and OOD
- How much experience do you have in other programming languages?
I studied html and learnt the basic syntax of javascript,php,css,c and
c++ just enough for me to be able to recognize, read and understand
them, not necessarily be able to write them though I can. I can’t say I
have much experience but I’ve been taking a look at other people’s code
and trying to edit a few for about a year now.
On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Samuel M. [email protected]
wrote:
What do you mean by “complete”?
I meant complete being able to master it. I had given myself a time
frame of 6 months to be able to achieve this but not sure if it is right
to restrict myself that way or a good thing push me to do more. At the
moment, I don’t even know if the 6 months is even maybe too much.
It’s always good to have goals - even if one doesn’t reach them. 
I’d say if you only do Ruby programming and learning for half a year
you should get pretty far.
and trying to edit a few for about a year now.
Hm, I’d say the major obstacle to reach your goal is lacking
experience in designing and implementing software. The most important
task in software engineering is to decide how to distribute
functionality across classes and methods and how to lay out data so
the system is maintainable (and also efficient). Learning that takes
the time you need to gather experience.
So, given that there are people visiting universities studying CS and
all mentioned above I guess for mastery half a year is by far not
enough. But maybe it doesn’t need to be mastery.
Kind regards
robert
I believe it’s impossible to master something by reading or learning,
only by doing.
Rails doesn’t requires deep ruby knowledge, try to start with real
project as soon as possible (and meantime proceed with Your book and
improving ruby knowledge).
There are lots of interesting open source ruby / rails projects (use
GitHub to search for it), use it
as a sample.
On Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:45:30 +0900
Samuel M. [email protected] wrote:
Hi
I’ve been learning and practicing ruby for 2 weeks and a half and I’m
wondering now as to how much longer it’ll take before I complete ruby.
If definite, please let me know how long it takes to learn ruby on the
average.
I also want to finish as early as possible 'cos I want to start with
ruby on rails as soon as possible.
10,000 hours makes for a competent beginner. =)
But to be honest, there’s no such thing as “complete”.
I agree with the sentiment that you should just begin working on some
interesting projects. Doing is what helps master programming.
In ten years you’ll still be learning new and interesting things.
There won’t be a point when you stop and say “I’m done learning now”.
In programming as it is in life…