From: Philip Hallstrom <ruby@...>
Date: 2007-02-06T10:27:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Newbie Advice.

> I'm starting to look at code snippets over at Ruby Forge... I also
> just got laid off a few weeks ago, so money is tight, otherwise, I'd
> go out and buy The Ruby Way, which I perused at Barnes and Noble last
> week and fell in love with.
>
> So, I ask you, the gurus... Where do I start?  This feels like a
> writer's block and I'm sick of reading.  I want to start *doing*
>
> I have the IDEs installed, I have Ruby installed on my Gentoo Linux
> box...

Well, I've never been able to learn anything unless I had a reason to 
learn it... I think you just hit that point.

You've got to find something that interests you... based on your situation 
I would suggest a "resume builder".

Define your resume in YAML.  That is, put all your past jobs, your 
experience, anything that is "repeatable" into a YAML file.  Then write a 
script to parse those YAML files and spit out nicelly formatted ascii 
text, HTML, and PDF files.

You'll learn a lot and it will be useful.

Then when you're done with that, move it to the web and create your first 
Rails project to do the same thing.

I did that several years ago when I wanted to learn the Smarty template 
language for PHP and it worked great.  My project was small enough that I 
understood it, but big enough to let me play around with somethings I 
normally didn't get to play with.

> I'm sick of writing things asking for the user's name and if they want
> to try a chocolate chip cookie. :)

But I like chocolate chip cookies! :)

> Thanks so much in advance.  I apologize for my verbosity.

Good luck!