From: Timothy Hunter <TimHunter@...>
Date: 2006-08-04T07:24:37+09:00
Subject: Re: I’m having a hard time learning ruby.

Dave Howell wrote:
>
> On Aug 3, 2006, at 12:55, Paul van Delst wrote:
>
>> Nate Imaqaguy wrote:
>>> For starters, just do you know where I�m coming from: I have little 
>>> to no programming experience, except for some C and VB classes I 
>>> took 6 years ago, which I did fine in.
>>> My biggest hurdle getting started with ruby is finding which 
>>> methods/classes/files to call upon for whatever the heck I�m trying 
>>> to accomplish.
>
> Well, I had years of experience in lots of languages when I started 
> into Ruby, but my experience definitely did NOT include Java or C, 
> which is taken for granted in a lot of documentation. "This works a 
> lot like a C zingwanger, except you can modify it while it's running," 
> and the like. Sigh.
>
> Playing the guessing game of "if I were a command to do X, what would 
> I call myself?" is something I still get to do a lot of. "Collect" and 
> "index," (I'd never have guessed 'index' was a search function!) for 
> arrays, and figuring out which of "chomp/chop/slice/split/strip" 
> methods for strings I might want, were all non-obvious solutions to 
> various problems I had when programming.
I think the 2nd Edition of Hal Fulton's _The Ruby Way_ is going to help 
with this problem. It's got more of a "here's a problem, how do you 
solve it with Ruby" orientation.