From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-03-12T20:50:57+09:00
Subject: Re: How Many hours in A day

On 12 Mar 2009, at 08:05, Robert Klemme wrote:
> 2009/3/11 Zayd Connor <devrubygem@gmail.com>:
>> 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 :) To the
>> professional Ruby programmers that read this post, how many hours  
>> in the
>> day did you take time out to code when climbing up that hill.
>
> Now you got six responses already and all are quite different. I think
> it totally depends on the person, whether it's work time or leisure
> time, what knowledge you got already, what your learning type is, how
> much time you can spare.  I do not believe anybody can answer this
> honestly from a distance - what works good for some, might not work
> for you.

Probably the best general advice is: code until you get bored and then  
stop until you feel interested again. For some of us the former can be  
a very long time indeed whilst the latter might be a very brief break,  
but this really will depend on how much someone likes bashing their  
head against brick walls.

Also never be afraid to put a problem aside for a couple of days and  
do something completely unrelated: procrastination is a programmer's  
best friend :)

>> 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 probably a good idea because it will help you understand what's
> going on when you have to loot at Rails source code and the logic has
> to be implemented in Ruby anyway.

Yep, knowing the language you're coding in is often much more  
important than knowing the framework you're coding to as it opens up  
so many new possibilities for solving problems.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason