From: Vincent Foley <vfoley@...>
Date: 2005-05-24T11:55:17+09:00
Subject: Making a scripting tutorial

Hello everyone,

I am part of a Linux User Group in Quebec, and I would like to make a
presentation one day about Ruby.  Since most people there are not
programmers, but mostly system administrators and that most of them
know nothing about scripting beyond piping a command into grep, I
thought it would be a nice opportunity to show them Ruby and how it can
help them in their everyday tasks.

Now, I would like to know, what sort of material I should cover for an
introduction?  Is there already material out there that I could ues?  I
will definitly need an introduction to Ruby, its syntax, etc. that is
as concise and clear as possible.  My plan of the tutorial right now
would be something along the lines of:

- Running a Ruby program and using irb
- Basic classes (Integer, Array, String)
- Showing how to do input/output with gets and puts
- Showing how to do file and directory operations
- Conditionals and loops (probably limit it to if, while and for x in)
- Using regular expressions*
- Useful modules (Net::Http, Net::SSH, Net::FTP, anything else that
would be useful for sysadmin?)
- Have one or two practical scripts

* could be skipped if the rest is too long

How does that sound?  Is there stuff I'm forgetting that I should
mention?  Is it too long for just a first introduction?  Or good
enough, and if they're interested, they can buy the Pickaxe and ask
questions?

Thanks for the input,

Vincent.