From: Sy <sy1235@...>
Date: 2005-04-19T22:45:22+09:00
Subject: Re: On motivating a Ruby nubie

Just to follow up on this topic, I've finally begun my quest into
Ruby[1].  Instead of doing things the way I've always thought of
learning.. I decided to have my learning experience be the original
hobbyest approach.

You all remember when you were young and in love with some hobby or
other.. and you just hacked around with it and picked things up.  This
learning process is "no big deal" and wasn't about "learning a skill
in 30 days" or "adopting a new skillset" or "adapting your portable
skills" or whatever other bs buzzphrase you want.  It was about trying
something new and having a lot of fun.

Well I haven't lost that child-like mindset, so I spent some time
redefining my core motivations to just hack around at Ruby and learn
as I go.  No hands on the handlebars for this one.

It all began with my rewriting a simple application launcher[2].  It
accepts an input and launches a command:

I recently adapted it so it'll work on Windows.  I also looked at
wrapping it up into a standalone executable with tar2rubyscript[3] and
rubyscript2exe[4].

I'm focusing my learning so that in the next few weeks I can get a
basic installer[5] put together that will replace a simple batch file.
 I hope to end up converting in into a GUI installer thingy using
WxRuby[6] (recommended by  Erik Veenstra of tar2rubyscript fame).  I
am hesitant to use it, but RubyWebDialogs[7] was also recommended
(well.. Erik did make it).

The important thing about all of that is that it's for work.  Yes, I
have an opportunity to wriggle some Ruby scripting in work.  I made a
couple of "bonus disks" for our main product, which stealthily inserts
additional content that the main developer is too lazy (!) to do
himself..  and the idea has been a huge hit and is one of the driving
forces of our success.

I wrote a batch file which has grown increasingly more complex.  All
it really has to do is copy a tree of files into a specific directory
and delete a few files.  I'd like to expand it to allow a
user-selected or automatically-detected directory.  The big push is
that soon this'll need to work on a mac.  So.. although there are
probably excellent products out there which do what I need, I figure
this is simple enough that I could write an installer in Ruby!

So I think I've met my learning goals with this..

* it's a real-world thing
* it's something I'm genuinely interested in
* it's easily defined and also has existing products for me to help
define what it should do and how it should look
* it starts both small and simple and can become complex as my
abilities improve.

I'm into my second week, and my enthusiasm hasn't wavered.. so I think
that I'll do well in the long term.



[1] http://sysy.homeip.net/mw/index.php/The_Ruby_Nuby
[2] http://sysy.homeip.net/mw/index.php/TRN_-_Launcher
[3] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/tar2rubyscript/index.html
[4] http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe/index.html
[5] http://sysy.homeip.net/mw/index.php/TRN_-_Installer
[6] http://trug.stok.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=WxRuby
[7] http://trug.stok.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=RubyWebDialogs