From: Martin Bryce Date: 2008-01-11T01:28:28+09:00 Subject: Newbie questions Hallo everybody. I discovered the Ruby Quiz site some time ago and I've been much intrigued by the Ruby language. So I've begun trying to solve some of the old problems, and I'm very interested in learning Ruby to finally resume work on my many old hobby projects that lie unfinished since when I stopped using Pascal and then never managed to use C++ for anything that I didn't *REALLY HAVE* to do ;) As an hobbyist programmer, I am an orphan of the good old Borland Turbo Pascal 7 ;) I remember well how I learnt to use it mostly from the online help (!) many years ago, in school. The thing I most liked about it was the tight integration of every part (editor, compiler, debugger) and the well-organized default libraries: I put "uses crt" at the beginning and had my console/speaker functions, "uses graph" and I had my graphics primitives, etc... Pretty rudimental things for today's standards, yeah, but I never found something that usable anymore. And I'm talking about a 16-bit DOS application... ^___^ So, I'd like to know if someone put together a well-documented "compilation" of basic libraries for 2D graphics, *simple* windowing, audio, and inline C functions. Nothing too fancy: the easier the better, since I have to worry first and foremost about learning Ruby for now. I like to spend time writing clever algorithms (well, as clever as I manage to be ;), much less managing interfaces. Also, I don't like to be forced to read dozens of specifications to choose a couple of libraries for a 300-line program: i'll do that if and when programming becomes my main job :P I've googled far and wide and found many interesting projects that may wery well be worth a try, but I would like to know well my "base architecture" while I learn, and not overwhelm myself with details already. For the same reason I'd like to use only stable and well-documented libraries (eg. the "shoes" project that has been advertised yesterday seems very much like what I need for graphics, but alphas are for people who KNOW what they are doing, right?) I've seen that many efforts have been done in this sense regarding Rails, but I'm not interested in web development (yet ;) so they aren't quite what I need. Quite the opposite, I'd like to dabble with hardware a bit, e.g. writing a control application for a small microcontroller device that needs to communicate via serial port. Thanks in advance for any response ^__^ -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.