From: Adam Akhtar Date: 2008-12-10T18:40:17+09:00 Subject: Re: Completely new programmer lacks direction hi I started ruby a year ago and faced exactly the same problem as you. If you do a search for posts under my name in quotes youll find some of my earlier posts and reccs there. If you havent got a good enough grounding to start confidently building your first simple scripts then id say you should just go through the chris pine learning to program book. Fortunately its not as dense as other books and is an easy read plus it has exercise - a must for any book thats aimed at learning. Once youve done that you should be more comfortable with the language. Thats what i did and after that i went on to the excellent book Everyday Scripting. Dont let the testers part in the subtitle on amazon put you off its suitable for everyone (other reviewers say so as well) especially beginners. In that book youll be making actual scripts such as an amazon screen scraper etc rather than exercises like 99 bottles. Its a great book and like all good beginner books provides exercises for you to practice with. After that i dont think youll need pointers in what to do, youll know enough that youll start thinking of things because you know you can acomplish them. I think when you havent got the grasp of something your subconcious seems to hide excellent project ideas from you! I went on to make a simple ebay screen scraper as the commercial ebay market research sites didnt cover something i needed. Then a todo list in preparatino for rails and now a budgeting app. They are all written for the console. Oh and get really good with arrays and these libary methods .each .collect .find .find_all .inject .join you will use them all the time! good luck! -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.