From: seebs@... (Peter Seebach)
Date: 2007-07-13T11:54:56+09:00
Subject: Re: I need serious help!

In message <3086e6b698191ec82127967a5cb62076@ruby-forum.com>, Joe Wiltrout writes:
>I sorta have no money to use on books and the like. I was hoping I could 
>avoid buying anything by consulting the greater population of Ruby 
>programmers. Maybe get someone to post a link to a good website that 
>dumbs the tutorials down enough for me to understand. And who knows? 
>Maybe I will get good enough that I will be able to go over to C++ and 
>not be this stupid. But I have heard that text-based games are easier to 
>make than games with moving graphics, so I might start off with a Sky 
>Pirate text-based game instead. It all depends whats easiest for a 
>beginner.

If you wanna write text adventures, my recommendation would be Inform 6.
(I don't like 7 as much.)  It's a domain-specific language, but gets a
lot of advantages from it; on the other hand, it is probably by far the
quirkiest language I've ever used.

Ruby's a nice generic language for learning things.  You can find
Pine's learning to program online, although I couldn't swear that it's
word-for-word identical to the printed book.

Depending on what kind of "no money" is involved, if it's possible for you
to save up a few bucks here and there, it's not that hard to get a good
reference or something, and it is VERY useful.  (You might consider the
PDF version of the PickAxe, which is cheaper than paper.)

-s