“Nate I.” [email protected] wrote in message
news:[email protected]…
For starters, just do you know where I’m coming from: I have little to
no programming experience, except for some C and VB classes I took 6
years ago, which I did fine in.
This is, perhaps, your biggest hurdle, in my opinion. As much as I
love
Ruby, I’ve always been suspicious of Ruby as a first language. It’s so
free
and lacks any kind of hand-holding, which is a breath of fresh air for
experienced programmers but can be a hurdle for novices…
My biggest hurdle getting started with ruby is finding which
methods/classes/files to call upon for whatever the heck I’m trying to
accomplish.
However, if this is your only problem then you're probably a more
competent programmer than you let on. If that’s the case, Paul’s
suggestion
of this reference will be valuable to you:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/builtins.html
It's not exactly searchable but, if you know what kind of behaviour
you’re looking for, you can probably simply guess what you’re looking
for
and be right. For instance, if you’re looking for string concatenation,
then you can guess that it will be a method of the “String” class and
then,
look at all the methods of that class for something that might suggest
concatenation. You can get quite far doing simply this…
I’m use to being able to perform a search, like in MSDN Library, using
key words of something I’m trying to perform. Then research results
from there, and get pointed in the right direction (with explanations on
what the feature does, and examples, etc).
I'm an experienced MS Windows developer and I am, thus, intimately
familiar with both the Win32 API and the MSDN Library and, yet, despite
all
this, I’ve never found the search tool (as you’ve described it) useful,
so I
can’t help you here.
I don't know if this is considered rude or not but, since the
Pickaxe
book is available online at:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/
...you could simply suck down the entire site and perform your
search on
the HTML, all for free. Again, I don’t know how the community feels
about
you downloading the entire online “book,” so my apologies if this is
considered rude…
And I can’t really find any close equivalent to using something like an
MSDN Library. The best thing someone has pointed me to so far is
http://www.ruby-doc.org/. Which is cool and all, but it’s not really
“searchable”-you kind of have to know what file/class/method to look up
in the first place. And even if I find what I think I’m looking for,
the documentation is confusing to me. Sometimes there isn’t the
slightest word as to what something does.
Embarrassingly enough, I wasn't aware of ruby-doc.org before and,
now
that I’m looking at it, it looks like an excellenet reference, which
doesn’t
bode well for the advice I have given you up til now. I haven’t
scrutinized
it but ,judging from the documentation for class “Array,” it looks
rather
thorough. Are you looking up more obscure functionality?
Someone told me about “.methods”, but that only works if you’re in an
irb session, which I find painful to use because I have to type all my
code in, line by line. I can’t even figure out how to paste each line
of the code I already have. Inevitably I fat finger something and get
mad.
The "methods" method works anywhere in Ruby but it is most useful in
an
IRB session.
I’m unsure why you want to type in your entire program into IRB.
You
probably just want to type in relevant situations to test Ruby’s
behaviour,
such as operator precedence or regex behaviour.
If you want to look at all the methods of a class, you simply need
to
create an object of said class and call the “methods” method, perahps
followed by the “sort” method which can help you find what you’re lookig
for…
So, you can kinda see a n00bs frustration…
I must be missing something big. Any tips (other than “try not to suck
so much”)?
I assure you, we're all familiar with frustration, even if it's not
over
the same things.
Good luck to you and I hope you make progress!