Monday, October 14, 2013

The Pragmatic Approach to Ruby

Ruby is becoming a friend, slowly but surely we'll become BFFs. Many challenges, successes and Aha! moments.

Flow Controls

Struggled with flow controls in Chris Pine's Learn to Program. Come to find out I was reading the lines wrong and confused myself.  Of course I found this out when I reached out to a friend an hour and some change later. Pssh.

I was over on Stack Overflow and someone mentioned Rubber Ducking. It's where you place a rubber duck on your desk and tell it your deepest/darkest secrets challenges.

By talking to the ducky it helps you realize where you went wrong. So I've been talking to my little buddy here and yes, it does help.

Arrays and Iterators

Spent way too long trying to figure out the 'A few things to try' section in Pine's book. I pushed through with the lesson and made comments on the PDF as I went and bookmarked things to review.

Pragmatic Ruby Programming Video Course

Started Pragmatic Ruby Programming on October 11th. Was introduced to the Ruby ri Tool and wow, big help.

It includes 25 videos, workbook and lots of other goodies. In total, the videos are five hours but I spent nine hours on the first couple of lessons working through the tasks and the bonus tasks, slow and steady. I'm almost complete with the course though a few things have tripped me up.

...freaking error messages during testing.

Spent over three hours trying to find out how to get Rspec to work in Sublime, gave up and tried it via the command line---more error messages. I figured out the first issue... I forgot the 'do' on line 11. So simple.

So after that was solved I moved on and more errors popped up and I made sure all my 'dos' were there. Still trying to figure out what's happening.

I have to say the the visuals are a big help and the workbook is a plus along with the deeper dive reading material, Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 by Dave Thomas.

New to me (Discoveries):

Divvy - workspace window manager.
Octopress - blogging framework.
Contributed to Daniel Kehoe's book kickstarter, Learn Ruby on Rails.

THIS WEEK: 48.52 hours TOTAL: 112.68 hours

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