learn ruby on rails

The Ruby study group I’m part of has now met three times. We have a holiday break for Thanksgiving, and another one or two meetings will be canceled in December. It’s hard to stay motivated during these times; without the pressure of the weekly meetings, I find myself online amusing myself with blog posts instead of working out Ruby problems.

If I found a sure remedy for this plateau of interest in a subject, whether Ruby, exercise, or whatever, I know I could get millions from my patented solution.

That’s something which goes through my head pretty often when I read a tutorial or manual about a programming language. I read a statement written with obvious enthusiasm—sometimes even with an explanation point—and yet I just can’t match the author’s passion , because I can’t figure out why I should regard the item under discussion as so extremely good or bad.

So far why’s (poignant) guide has engaged me to a far greater degree than most programming texts, but, sadly, I found myself muttering “So what!” upon reading about symbols. Fortunately, I found other explanations on the Web which made me more appreciative.

Three of us sat in a mall food court in downtown San Francisco, and agreed that, yeah, it’s pretty hard to learn something when you don’t have a deadline to meet. So, we’re meeting every Thursday to talk about the why (poignant) guide, which will compel us to read the appropriate chapter by at least every Thursday afternoon.

Working through the chapters in Chris Pine’s book; am up to “Flow Control,” halfway through. The concepts are familiar to me from JavaScript and PHP—comparisons, methods.

I really like Pine’s approach in the examples; they’re not based on abstruse math (too many programming texts assume I’m interested in scripting a Fibonacci sequence or the Reynolds number).

Ten years ago everybody was excited about Java. Five years ago everybody was excited about Ajax. Now everybody is excited about RoR.

There are two things to learn here, though. One is the Ruby programming language, allegedly the simplest of all. The other is the Rails framework.

There’s almost too much information online, and as the_technocrat points out, much of it is inaccessible to those of us not coming from an OOP background. I don’t know why this is, unless it’s to prevent n00bs from gaining entry to the secret clubhouse.

1. set up Locomotive
2. followed a few chapters and the sample exercises in Chris Pine’s Learn to Program online
3. laughed heartily through the first three chapters of the genuinely enjoyable why’s (poignant) guide to ruby
4. been impressed by how many people recommend the Pickaxe Book
5. put up a bunch of stickies using the fantabulous SketchBox application from omz:software