I am trying to teach myself programming as a complete beginner. I use a
windows XP laptop. I have read up some of the basic concepts on Hackety
Hack and am now trying to use Chris P.s book ‘Learn to program’
I have installed Ruby 1.9.3 on my computer using an installer from here:
http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/ but am unsure if it is definitely
working.
The book says to download the latest version from rubyinstaller.org.
After that it says to make a new desktop folder and name it programs.
Done.
Now click the programs folder open and right-click in the
folder->New->Select Ruby P… Which no such file exists. What do I
do?
I have also downloaded the text editor sciTE.
These are the exact instructions I was given on page 17 of the book:
“First, let’s install Ruby. Go get the One-Click Installer from the
website
(http://rubyinstaller.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl) by clicking Download
and
then clicking the highest-numbered version of Ruby you see there
(version
1.8.6-26 as of this writing). When you run it, it will ask you where
you want to install Ruby and which parts of it you want installed. Just
accept all the defaults.
Now let’s make a folder on your desktop in which you’ll keep all of your
programs. Right-click your desktop, select New, and then select Folder.
Name it something truly memorable, such as programs. Now doubleclick
the folder to open it.
To make a blank Ruby program, right-click in the folder, select New,
and then select Ruby P… You can rename the file if you want,
but make sure to keep the .rb file extension, since that’s what tells
your
computer this is a Ruby program (and not an email or a picture of Mr.
Bean or something).
Now, when you installed Ruby, you also installed a really nice text
editor called SciTE (which is what I use when I’m on Windows or Linux).
To use it to edit your new program, right-click your program, and select
Edit. (When you get to the next chapter, you’ll even write a program”
I’ve tried turning a text file into an .rb extention but it wont give me
the option. How should I do this? Is there a way to check if ruby
installer is working on my laptop?
When I got to the installer section: ‘Installation Destination and
optional tasks.’ It asked me if I wanted 3 potional tasks: '1. Install
Tcl/Tk support. 2.Add Ruby executables to your PATH 3.associate .rb and
.rbw files with this ruby installation.
I dont understand any of these and the default is all 3 are unselected,
so I didn’t select any of them. Was this the right thing to do?
Any help would be much appreciated!
Thank you!