From: "David A. Black" <dblack@...>
Date: 2008-07-23T22:02:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Good exercises for beginner

Hi --

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Sam Haskins wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am an unexperienced programer, and though things like why's guide and other 
> tutorials do a good job of explaining syntax, I am trying to develop 
> experience in making real projects. I have tried to do the ruby quizzes, but 
> they are a bit too hard; I don't yet have a great feel for the best way to 
> approach problems, and so I ended up having to consult how other people 
> solved the quizzes to get over stuck points.
>
> Are there simpler exercises out there that would be good for a noob like me, 
> or do you think that reading code for a while might do better for 
> familiarizing me with technique?

A very good source of exercises is to try to (re)implement some of
Ruby's core methods in Ruby. For example, you could implement
Array#each like this:

   class Array
     def my_each
       i = 0
       until i == size
         yield self[i]
         i += 1
       end
       self
     end
   end

and similarly (though a bit more complexly) with other methods like
select and map. Sometimes this takes you into a more "low-level" style
of programming than you might use normally (like, maintaining an
explicit counter rather than just using an iterator), but it's very
good practice and a good way to learn.


David

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