From: Yun Huang Yong <yun@...>
Date: 2009-03-12T07:00:12+09:00
Subject: Re: How Many hours in A day

Zayd Connor wrote:
> I have a very simple ? How many hours in a day should someone who is new to ruby or programming spend learning and coding without over kill. Say two hours in the morning and two in the evening? Sometimes when running across problems that two hours can easily turn into 5 :) 
I only started using Ruby a couple of months ago and my recommendation 
is to experiment to find your own comfortable effort level.  When I 
first picked up The Ruby Programming Language (the O'Reilly book) I 
found it really readable, and I enjoyed the succinct examples.  As a 
result I read a little too much of it up front and even though 
everything made sense as I read it, I couldn't remember much of the 
detail when it came around to actually writing code. :)

I think as with learning any language you need a real goal (task) to 
achieve.  Its a bit tedious to just read and play with language syntax & 
idioms just for the heck of it and with a real goal you can read a bit, 
code a bit, and discover what you really need to read about next.

The downside to this approach is there are language features that can 
greatly simplify your design & code if you know about them so if you 
only learn on demand then you do run the risk of missing these.  But 
that's not so bad - its happened to me a few times and I just go back 
and re-factor things as I learn about new features.  You have to accept 
that you can't know everything from the start.

I think it took around a two weeks to get comfortable with Ruby to the 
point where I feel I could mostly do what I want without looking up 
documentation for every line of code.  Now I'm wrestling with RSpec. :)

Getting familiar with gems & RubyForge, ruby-doc.org, and the "fastri" 
gem will help a lot.
> I'm learning Rails and Ruby at the same time and sometimes I think I
> should just get comfortable with Ruby first before diving into Rails.
>   
That's a good idea, IMHO.

HTH,
yun

-- 
Yun Huang Yong
yun@nomitor.com                  ...nom nom nom
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