From: "David A. Black" Date: 2007-10-30T10:01:27+09:00 Subject: Re: Good learning-by-doing projects? Hi -- On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > David A. Black wrote: >> Hi -- >> >> On Tue, 30 Oct 2007, S?ren Andersen wrote: >> >>> Hello all, >>> >>> I'm fairly new to ruby coming from some Java. >>> I've been reading "The pragmatic programmers guide", which is pretty good. >>> But, I always find it's easier to learn the language using it, rather than >>> just reading about it. (Naturally...) >>> >>> So - what are your favorite "learning-by-doing"-proejcts? Both >>> ruby-specific, and generally? >> >> My "rite of passage" program for new languages is usually the >> word-game Jotto. (Somewhere I have my Ruby version of it....) I find >> game-ish things to be quite good for language-learning purposes. Not >> necessarily full-blown video games and such, but things like decks of >> cards, anagrams, and checker board moves. >> >> The main thing is to keep it all a bit fluid -- for instance, if >> you're doing a checker board, try it with arrays and also with the >> Matrix class. It can be a good excuse for exploring the language and >> trying things out. >> >> >> David >> > You *really* want that "checkers" Ruby Quiz, don't you? ;) That's funny -- I actually hadn't even read that thread. I wrote a Boggle game in Ruby once, and tried to generalize the algorithm so that it could use a board of any size and calculate legal letter paths. Not exactly the same as checkers, but similar in some ways. With the standard-size board (4x4), it was literally true that almost every case was an edge case. David -- Upcoming training by David A. Black/Ruby Power and Light, LLC: * Advancing With Rails, Edison, NJ, November 6-9 * Advancing With Rails, Berlin, Germany, November 19-22 * Intro to Rails, London, UK, December 3-6 (by Skills Matter) See http://www.rubypal.com for details!