If you don’t code try this. You might like it! It is an interactive, “hands-on” tutorial to Ruby, the programming language. If you do code, try it anyway if you haven’t picked up Ruby yet. This tutorial has been made with the beginner in mind, so the author does quite a bit of hand-holding. While it might be a bit basic for the more advanced hackers (still worth it though), the beginner will definitely find it fun to go through it. It has been written by the author of Poignant’s guide to Ruby, an illustrated (as in containing cartoon strips) and funny book with the odd enough goal of teaching a programming language. Did I mention the book is free and downloadable?

After a couple of months of fiddling around, I had not picked up Ruby just yet. Deciding that was enough pushing back, I dive into Ruby (pun intended). Its a programming language that’s built in such a way that it feels very natural using it. One thing that makes it intuitive is consistency. Everything in Ruby is an object (for the neophytes, an object is the term we use to represent a ‘thing’, anything you make it to be), which isn’t necessarily true in other programming languages.

If you do code a lot

I’m only getting to grips with Ruby, so I’ll refrain from giving any premature opinions. Non Ruby-speaking adept coders should check out these 15 exercises to get familiar with a programming language, I highly recommend it to learn any language. What I can say though is that so far, Ruby is very fun to use, and I think it is a suitable first programming language, containing enough advanced functionality.

Who knows? Ruby may even cause a comeback in style of metaprogramming.

Thursday, August 24th, 2006 @ 12:42 am software
RSS 2.0 Trackback