From: Reg <reg@...>
Date: 2009-04-13T15:45:03+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie confusion and dejection

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:40:08 -0500, john maclean <jayeola@gmail.com>
wrote:


>
>This is going to sound silly but until I got into unit testing I could
>never really think about what _I_ wanted to do but had to think about
>__how__ to do it. Mike Clark has writen an excellent guide to unit
>testing [0] and it's a bloody fast way to actually learn Ruby from the
>ground up.
>
>Before:
>/me: OK. I can use ri --this and ri --that but now I am ri
>Bored::shitless of all of this documentation. I want to start actually
>writing stuff but keep having to think about how it's done.
>
>after:
>/me: kapow! shazaam. Now I can test what I know. I'll see where my
>stuff goes wrong. Ah. So __that's__ how you use an array, huh? Take
>that! kaplow! So that's what you mean by regexp? So I think that I can
>get an IP address like this /\d+\d+\d+\d+/.
>
>and I can now test bits of my code whilst I am thinking about what I want to do.
>
>That make sense?
>
>[0] http://clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/Ruby?_start=6

It makes sense and did not sound silly, but these further questions
are going to sound silly and a bit pathetic too.  I have been coddled
too long in programming environments like Macromedia Dreamweaver and
MS Visual Studio

1. Mike Clark says " Now, let's run the test."   What is he running it
in?  Is that the Ruby console?  
2. Is there some way to write an app that will run as a windows
graphical user interface?
3. I am currently using the ConText editor. Is there an equivalent of
the MSVisualBasic IDE?
4. Should I be setting up a Ubuntu partition an learn Ruby in there?

Thanks for your patience
Reg