From: Hilary Bailey <my77elephants@...>
Date: 2010-05-06T09:56:05+09:00
Subject: Re: School teacher still at it learning programming language

Samuel Williams wrote:
> Dear Hilary,
> 
> If you are new to Ruby I recommend the following page:
>   http://programming.dojo.net.nz/languages/ruby/index
> 
> It has links to good beginner tutorials and related information.
> 
> I recommend you look at YAML for storing, processing and outputting 
> data. It integrates with Ruby very easily and reduces the complexity of 
> handing data.
> 
> Secondly, I recommend you avoid Rails to begin with unless you are 
> specifically after a web based interface. Once you've got your ideas 
> working (i.e. data processing) it is easy to add a web interface. So, 
> for now focus on the data processing.
> 
> Thus, I recommend writing a set of shell scripts to process your data 
> and produce results. This is an easy target to begin with and you can 
> improve it from there - i.e. add a GUI or web front end - whatever suits 
> you.
> 
> Once you've got your basic processing algorithm in place, I recommend 
> you investigate either Rake or optparse - these both allow you to make 
> more complex shell scripts with options and configuration - for example:
> 
> With optparse:
> $ ./process_data.rb --districts a,b,c --method=average 
> --ignore-subjects=science
> 
> With rake:
> 
> $ rake process_districts[a b c]
> 
> You will likely end up refactoring the code eventually anyway - start 
> simple and go from there!
> 
> Kind regards,
> Samuel

Dear Samuel,
Thanks for such detail guide. I just opened the link and will use it as 
a guide. Someone recommended that at some point I should use Shoes. Do 
you know what kind of program this is? Is it similar to Excel,Rake or 
YAML?

Once again thank you for such detailed guide.

Yours truly,

Hilary
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