I am new to programming. I read the ebook “Learn to Program” by Chris
Pine and typed out the code to get familiar with it throughout the book.
I feel I have the general basics of it.
I was wondering on what I should do next? I want to get a career in
programming and I don’t know the next step I should take. I know I need
experience with programming in order to get a career in it so I need
some practice first.
Any help would be much appreciated.
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 09:05:42AM +0900, Nathan Kossaeth wrote:
I was wondering on what I should do next? I want to get a career in
programming and I don’t know the next step I should take. I know I need
experience with programming in order to get a career in it so I need
some practice first.
What kind of programming do you think you’ll want to do? Web
programming? Integration (i.e., tying other software tools together)
coding? Desktop application development? One of a few dozen other
things?
The key, of course, is to start working on small projects. Figure out
some stuff you wish your computer would do, and tackle those things as
personal projects, just to get some practice. Which direction to focus
your efforts, and what resources you might want to check out for more
ideas on how to learn the ins and outs of software development, can be
guided by the ultimate direction you want to go (if you know yet).
Also . . . what kind of budget do you want to put into learning? How
much effort do you want to put into setting up environments for the
actual software development itself? Should I recommend books (I think
Everyday Scripting with Ruby and Eloquent Ruby are two excellent
choices for a next book after something like Chris P.'s)? Should I
suggest you get a Unix-like environment (FreeBSD, Mint Linux, or PC-BSD,
for instance) set up so you’re doing your computing in conditions that
lend themselves to having ways to automate pretty much everything you
do?
Hopefully, either some of what you want was addressed above or you have
some good ideas now how to help us help you further. Welcome to
programming with Ruby! It’s a lot of fun, at least for me, and I hope
you enjoy it as much as I do.
I would like to do web programming, integration, and coding mainly. I
have a descent budget and I can get a virtual box to set up Fedora( or
any other linux OS) if needed. The books you recommended, are they
ebooks? I am extremely dedicated to learning programming and I really
want to do this. Do you have any suggestions on small projects I can do
to start out doing?
One more thing, do you know of any other Ruby websites that would be of
help? I was doing an internship at Rackspace and one of the ruby
developers gave me a lot of links and I didn’t save them. One of those
websites was a site where they give you a program that has an error in
it and you have to try to figure out the problem and fix it before you
go onto the next one.
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Nathan Kossaeth <
[email protected]> wrote:
websites was a site where they give you a program that has an error in
it and you have to try to figure out the problem and fix it before you
go onto the next one.–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
Hi, Nathan,
I put together Ruby Kickstart (http://ruby-kickstart.com/) to help
people
learn to program in Ruby 
There are six videos of me teaching my friends, plus an extra one about
recursion. There are quizzes you can choose to go through, and there is
a
series of about 60 challenges with tests so that you can work on them on
your own and know immediately if you got the answer correct. Solutions
are
also provided, so if you think that’s what you need, you’ll be able to
reference one way I did it. At the end, you’ll make a very simple web
application and put it online.
If you go through this and find yourself struggling, you’re welcome to
shoot me an email.
I’ve also had someone go through it and come up with a very elegant
solution and send it to me. Wound up using the solution in a
presentation I
gave
Also, find local usergroups so you can chat with other people who are
excited about the same things. Here in Chicago, there’s a Ruby meetup
about
3 times a month. Great way to meet new people and get inspired.
-Josh
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 6:33 PM, Josh C. [email protected]
wrote:
Also, find local usergroups so you can chat with other people who are
excited about the same things. Here in Chicago, there’s a Ruby meetup about
3 times a month. Great way to meet new people and get inspired.
For this, check http://www.meetup.com/
-Josh
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 9:30 PM, Nathan Kossaeth <
[email protected]> wrote:
Curious. They’re hosted on Amazon S3. Anyone else having trouble with
S3?
When I click on them I get about:blank, but when I go to my S3 console,
it
gives the same link.
anyway, it looks like you can download them off of their Vimeo pages.
On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 08:27:07AM +0900, Nathan Kossaeth wrote:
I would like to do web programming, integration, and coding mainly. I
have a descent budget and I can get a virtual box to set up Fedora( or
any other linux OS) if needed. The books you recommended, are they
ebooks? I am extremely dedicated to learning programming and I really
want to do this. Do you have any suggestions on small projects I can do
to start out doing?
In my experience, using a Unix-like OS as one’s primary working
environment really lends itself to finding opportunities to write small
programs that help one get things done, thus creating a naturally
encouraging environment for people learning to program.
The book Everyday Scripting With Ruby should be available as an ebook,
though I have not checked. I have a hardcopy version of the book on my
shelf. You might want to check the Pragmatic Programmers site to see if
they have it available for sale as an ebook.
The book Eloquent Ruby is definitely available as both an ebook and a
hardcopy book. I bought the ebook for my Nook just before I adopted my
policy of only buying ebooks if the price represents enough of a
discount
from the hardcopy book that it saves me the amount of money I might get
if I sold the hardcopy book to a used book store. I’m glad I did,
because it is probably one of the top five programming books I have
read.
That’s a pretty tough category to break into, given the high quality of
many Ruby books.
For Web programming, you might try playing around with Ruby Web
frameworks like Rails and Sinatra. Otherwise, I think learning to get
along with a Unix-like command line, and starting to use Ruby to
automate
things you do every day there, could prove an excellent way to start
writing code regularly. After working on small stuff like that, you
will
probably start developing a lot of your own ideas for projects to
undertake.
One more thing, do you know of any other Ruby websites that would be of
help? I was doing an internship at Rackspace and one of the ruby
developers gave me a lot of links and I didn’t save them. One of those
websites was a site where they give you a program that has an error in
it and you have to try to figure out the problem and fix it before you
go onto the next one.
There are sites that offer small tasks you can tackle for coding
practice, such as Ruby Q., Project Euler, and Programming Koans. You
could try searching the Web for examples of programming tasks people
talk
about using in job interviews, and implement those in Ruby as a way to
practice. As already mentioned, Ruby Kickstart might be good, though I
do not have direct experience with it (yet). If it’s still around,
there’s always Hackety-Hack.
Hey Josh,
Thank you so much. For some reason when I click the download button
next to your videos, they don’t do anything. I have a not so great
internet connection and was wanting to download the videos while at work
so I can watch them when I get home. There any way I can be able to
download the videos?
So basically what you’re saying Marc is write a simple program that
works. Then slowly build on it? What is OOP fashion?
OOP is Object Oriented Programming, Ruby is an Object Oriented
Programming
Language.
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 5:02 PM, Nathan Kossaeth <
The only way to learn ruby is to write ruby scripts.
Rather than focus on books, I advise you to focus on code.
Start a small script. Have it do one thing well.
Extend it slowly in an OOP fashion.
Try to stay elegant and succint when possible.
When you don’t know how to solve something, ask others
whether that is good. If they say it is bad, they say
where to improve.
Do this for a few months and you should be quite good
in Ruby.
The problem-solving domain of programming is unspecific
to any particular language though.
Also, if you can, always try to learn more about math.
Higher math I almost forgot completely, we learned that
in school.
If you need a project go to http://projecteuler.net/ and start working
through the problems.
They are interesting problems mathematically and will help your
understanding of math as well as programming.
Remember that you’re learning to program in Ruby, but the language is
incidental; focus on the basics of computer science.
You’ll find a great list of tutorials and documentation here:
Documentation.
Whenever you’re programming keep this docs page open:
Index of Files, Classes & Methods in Ruby 1.9.3 (Ruby 1.9.3).
Then when you want to know what an Array can do you just go find the
class
and start reading methods. Eventually you will reach a critical mass of
knowledge and solutions to problems will present themselves through the
methods you’ve learned.
Good luck! Go code for a month or two and check back in.
On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Jonan S.
[email protected]wrote:
If you need a project go to http://projecteuler.net/ and start working
through the problems.They are interesting problems mathematically and will help your
understanding of math as well as programming.
I’ve done 140 of those, and can say that while they’re wonderful for
learning problem solving, they don’t lend themselves well to OOP, and
that
Ruby is often far too slow to be a good choice of language for working
on
them.
I did try to model the challenges from RKS after this idea (e.g.
ruby-kickstart/session1/challenge at master · JoshCheek/ruby-kickstart · GitHub),
though, that you can work on a problem independently, and test it to
find
out if you got it correct (because I did find PE’s problems to be
enjoyable
and fruitful, even if I didn’t learn my coding style from them).
Hey Josh,
This is what it takes me to when I click on the download link. It just
takes me to a different page with just the video. I even signed up on
the website in order to download them.
Nathan
On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 9:30 PM, Nathan Kossaeth <
[email protected]> wrote:
Got this fixed, I hadn’t set the headers, so the content type was coming
in
as “application/octet-stream” instead of “video/x-m4v” which was causing
some browsers (i.e. Chrome) to not download them properly. I went
through
and changed them all, so they should be working now. Let me know if
there
are any other issues.
-Josh
On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 08:14:46AM +0900, Nathan Kossaeth wrote:
Hey Josh,
This is what it takes me to when I click on the download link. It just
takes me to a different page with just the video.
Have you tried right-clicking the link and choosing the option to
download the link?
Can I ask for help with coding no matter how simple it is to others? I
can’t seem to figure out why this simple code isn’t working…
That seemed to have worked. Thank you.
I have had to learn this the hard way, but you need to do your research
first. People don’t respect you if the answer is not hard to learn for
yourself. If that is not your goal, to earn respect, continue to ask,
but
be aware of the consequences.
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Nathan Kossaeth <
[email protected]> wrote:
Can I ask for help with coding no matter how simple it is to others? I
can’t seem to figure out why this simple code isn’t working…–
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
–
Sincerely,
Isaac S.
Section C-4B Vice Chief, Order of the Arrow
Vice Chief of Administration, Tecumseh #65
Eagle Scout
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