From: Ryan Davis <ryand-ruby@...>
Date: 2007-07-25T07:20:14+09:00
Subject: [ANN/PIMP] Ruby Certificate Program @ University of Washington This Fall

There is a certificate course at the UW starting this fall. It is 3  
quarters long starting at rubynewb, then rails/web development, then  
rubyjedi. no, not the real titles. You are not required to take all  
three courses. do what feels right. To take just one:

	http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/certificates/rby/rby_sce.asp

There is space available. apparently, plenty of space... so take make  
this a success, if you are interested or suspect someone you know is  
interested, PLEASE, help make it happen.

-----

Course syllabus for fall quarter is below:

      1. Basics

      2. Language Summary
          hello world
          invoking methods (go see ri)
          Basic datatypes: string, range, numbers, regexps, symbols
          Control flow structures: if/unless/case/loop/while/until

      3. Testing Concepts & Unit Testing

            From here on out, the classes and homework will be
            driven via tests:

            All homework will have impl and tests where the student
            needs to write tests for the impl and find any possible
            bugs and write impl for the tests to make them pass. By
            attacking on both sides, you'll get a better
            appreciation for TDD and still have real world examples
            of (buggy) code without tests.

      4. Language in More Detail
          Containers: Arrays, Hashes, Files... Enumerable
          More control flow
          Iterators & closures (incl syntax for x in y;
            break/redo/next/retry)
          Exception handling

      5. Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
          Classes
                is-a vs. has-a, instances vs classes
          Methods/messages
          Modules
                include/extend, when to use vs classes
          Philosophical: do the simplest thing that could possibly work

      6. Playing with Standard Libraries
          Libraries (find, time, yaml, marshal)
          RubyGems / RAA / rubyforge
          tcp chat server

      7. Projects Week 1: iTunes Data Mining, Inc.
            or self-driven project you'd rather.

      8. Projects Week 2: Student Driven
          Regular Expressions, CSV, Data Mining

      9. Projects Week 3: Extending by playing with Popular Libraries
          Hpricot - html/xml parser
          Mechanize - web scraper

      10. Playing Well with Others
          Working with & contributing to the open-source community