Adventures in Learning Ruby

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basic ruby bob the teenager exercise in sublime text

Dear Katha,

Right. So. I haven’t been posting much or reading much lately. Where’ve I been?

Web developer school.

I’m pretty much pants at design, so I’m attempting to learn Ruby. Serious programming. This is so not HTML. It’s a lot more fun than HTML, although the learning curve is much higher.

I seriously don’t know what I’m doing. 

This week, I finally learned the difference between local and instance variables. It’s not that hard. I don’t know why I didn’t know the difference before. I probably should have figured it out way before classes even started. We’re starting Rails in a week and I’m still shaky on almost every concept in Ruby.

Three weeks ago I wouldn’t have knows what to do with the Bob the teenager exercise (above) at all, so I suppose that’s progress. I can debug things, but I have no idea what to do with them or really why exactly they work.

I’ll figure it out sometime.

My instructor encouraged us all to blog (our Ruby notes from class? Cool things we do? I don’t have any of those yet). I already have this blog, though, so I’m not sure if I’m really interested in picking up another. I suppose I could use my tumblr, but does anyone even read that? I don’t know. I don’t know if this is a good place to write, either. Maybe I’ll write about the softer side of programming here and leave the highly technical things for tumblr.

Hope you have a fantastic weekend!

Alex

Comments

  2. says

    That is so great that you are learning Ruby, any kind of code always looks like a completely foreign language to me and I always struggle to do simple things with my blog. It would be so great to actually have a grasp of what is going on.

    Good luck with your class, I’m sure you will catch on in no time!

  4. says

    Alex, I am impressed you are learning this and am sure it will be useful just as sure as I know it is Greek to me. I do know a lot about Ruby though, it is in the gem family corundum (sp?) and is actually a red sapphire, almost as hard as a diamond. I could go on and on, and I wont! I am from a different generation, completely, oh well!
    XX, Elle

  5. says

    I can’t actually view the code because it won’t enlarge on click but I’m on Python for the next 7 weeks. Seems exceedingly simple so far. I haven’t learned Ruby yet even though it’s on my computer just sitting there.. like a ton of other things I need to learn haha.

    I have plans on eventually adding a blog to my web develop/design site just to share knowledge with others as well as to track my own progress.

    Why are you in web developer school or should I say what do you plan on doing with it?

    • says

      I didn’t set it to enlarge– maybe sometime in the future I’ll actually put it in correctly. I don’t know any Python, but I plan on picking it up. Sometime. Yeah. Maybe after Ruby.

      Lately I’ve been regretting not majoring in CS more and more… so I’m going to take a web development three month intensive at the end of this year (or beginning of next). And brush up on my CS fundamentals. It’s been a long time and my math skills aren’t really up to snuff either. Need to really brush up on algorithms.

  6. says

    I can’t actually view the code because it won’t enlarge on click but I’m on Python for the next 7 weeks. Seems exceedingly simple so far. I haven’t learned Ruby yet even though it’s on my computer just sitting there.. like a ton of other things I need to learn haha.

    I have plans on eventually adding a blog to my web develop/design site just to share knowledge with others as well as to track my own progress.

    Why are you in web developer school or should I say what do you plan on doing with it?

    • says

      It looks crazy at first, but it’s amazing how quickly it starts to make sense. It’s not like CSS or HTML though, which I think are a less complicated and more straightforward. Of course, I’m not really good at those either!