From: Benjohn Barnes <benjohn@...>
Date: 2006-03-17T09:16:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Newbie question


On 15 Mar 2006, at 00:47, Annika Karhunen wrote:

> I stumbled to Ruby by accident and read the beginning of Why's guide,
> which sounded a a bit more fun than some other guides. I wonder if my
> 200MHz P2 laptop with Win98 can handle the program (compiler?)

I believe Ruby will run on a palm pilot, so I think your P2's  
probably up to the task, provided you don't want to do anything to  
intense with it.

> Meanwhile I've lost the link to learning Ruby online - anyone knows  
> the
> link is still working? Perhaps Ruby is too difficult for me afterall,
> since I'm dyslexic and have no experience of command language, let  
> alone
> of programming...

You've lost the like to Why's guide? Google? :)

In terms of learning a language, I would seriously recommend Ruby as  
a lovely starting point. It's certainly what I would pick if I was  
tutoring someone at the moment. I think it's pretty clean generally,  
but much more importantly, it's so direct, quick, and to the point.

Being able to do:
	require 'socket'
	server = TCPServer.new(5000)
	soc = server.accept
	soc.puts "Hello TCP connection"
	puts soc.gets

in to irb, and open up another window running a telnet session on  
port 5000 and have the two talk - that completely amazed me, coming  
from a c++ background. :) It was like being back on a BBC in the good  
old days, but with all sorts of lovely modern things.

BTW, I'm not dyslexic; I was diagnosed as just being really bad at  
spelling. Some good friends who are dyslexic  are very good  
programmers though, so I wouldn't worry about that at all. Best of  
all, programmers are generally outrageously bad at spelling, so no  
one's likely to notice if you are :)

Cheers,
	Benjohn