Re: Totally lost in learning Ruby

On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Hilary Bailey <[e-mail]>wrote:

>
>  Now facing this reality, would it help if I used Linux instead of
> Windows 7?
>
>
I think you should not do this. It is tempting to think "if only I did this,
or had that, everything would be so much easier". This is why I own so many
books :P

Linux is a whole topic of its own. I suppose there might be some rewards to
using it, but certainly not enough to warrant switching, for someone in your
situation. IMO, Linux suffers serious usability issues, which is why I use a
Mac. I expect switching would just be a hindrance.

Windows will be fine, if your gems are just not working (make sure you have
the devkit), or you have to really beat your head against the wall to get
things to install and play nicely, then maybe you will have a reason to
switch, but I never had any issues like that when I used Windows, and there
are a number of people really putting a lot of work in to make the Windows
environment nice to use Ruby with.

So far, it sounds like your issue is that you are not getting the
information out of the books that they were hoping you would get out of
them. That is not an environment problem, so I think you should stick with
Windows.

I think the problem is the way you are trying to get information out of the
books you have / the way the books are guiding you to get information out.
The Revolutionist's Handbook has a maxim that I have found to be true in my
own life: "Activity is the only road to knowledge". When you go to learn
from these books, do you sit down and read them, try to piece the
information into some sort of cohesive bit of information, and then move on
to the next thing? Or do you read them, sit down and try to use them in a
program, see if they work the way they are described, see how you can take
them and combine them in a new way to do something interesting to you? I
suspect you have written extremely few programs by your confusion about the
compiler. That is not a problem in itself, but it will prevent you from
learning. I believe to "get it", you must ground the theory in some sort of
application that you comprehend on a more fundamental level. And playing
with the material out of your own creativity, writing your own code,
fabricating your own solution out of the building blocks the books give you,
I think, is the best way to translate the theory of Ruby programming into
something you internally understand.

I hope you don't find that to be offensive, I am just trying to express the
realization I've had to face in my own life, that there are good and bad
ways of learning. When you are using the good ways, you will amaze yourself
by how much you can pick up so quickly, and when you are using the bad ways,
you will make almost no progress, and be very frustrated by how even things
you know are simple turn out to be complicated.

Descriptions, written in English, are just abstractions for the actual,
concrete behaviour of the thing. They have their place, and can be a
wonderful way to communicate, but you must first understand how the
abstraction maps to the reality. You first have to have the foundations of a
mental model to map the new knowledge to. And that, I think, comes from
doing and playing.