From: Paul Hanchett <paulha@...>
Date: 2005-04-14T07:14:37+09:00
Subject: Re: On motivating a Ruby nubie

Sy wrote:
> Hey all.  I wanted to dive into a topic that's been on my mind for
> years.  I've been interested in programming for a very long time and
> yet somehow I've only ever dabbled.

Hey Syeed--  Welcome to the fray!  ;-)

<Snip!>

> Fine.  I like Ruby.  I want to learn Ruby.  How do I work on the
> problem of motivation?
> 
> Hack a little every day?  Read a little every day?  What books, what
> tutorials, what news channels?  I am not overwhelmed by the amount of
> choices.. but I am confused at what order to do things in and why. 
> The biggest challenge to a complete nubie is the number of tools Ruby
> uses..

Find a (small) project to do on your own and begin to write the code. 
Make it simple to start.  I began by rewriting the coWiki text parser in 
ruby.

It's sort of like learning any language-- Put yourself in a position 
where you need it and you will learn it.

The people here are very good at answering reasonable questions.  *I* 
haven't gotten flamed yet!  ;-)

I started by using SciTE for it's ability to easily run the code I'm 
editing.  But I think I'm going to spend some more effort on working 
doing the same with FreeRIDE, as it has more bells and whistles.  ;-) 
jEdit is also a choice.  I don't like how long it takes to start 
FreeRIDE and jEdit, SciTE is very quick and seems to understand about 
many languages-- It will run PHP scripts, if the computer is set up for it!

Paul