Hi! I’m a newbie to Ruby and programming. Can anyone recommend any
online sources that has Ruby source code available for study? Also, can
anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
I’m completing Chris P.'s Learning to Program book and will start the
Pickaxe book next. Thanks so much!
On 10/2/06, woodyee [email protected] wrote:
Hi! I’m a newbie to Ruby and programming. Can anyone recommend any
online sources that has Ruby source code available for study? Also, can
anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
I’m completing Chris P.'s Learning to Program book and will start the
Pickaxe book next. Thanks so much!
I find projects that give you good and fast feedback are best. Stuff
with a
GUI component is important too, so your finished efforts have some
visual presence that you can show off or feel proud of.
Also Ruby has a lot of very powerful APIs for processing network stuff.
You might find one that ties into your real world knowledge of stuff
like
Telnet, IRC, RSS, IM etc. Writing client apps for these kinds of
services
are good learning points - the protocols are well documented, in many
cases the Ruby libraries take care of a lot of the grunt work, and you
get exposed to important parts of the language like error handling.
If your intention is learning for fun, learn how to make UIs in Ruby.
Ruby ships with a UI toolkit called Tk, which is not pretty, but it
means
that you will appreciate the ‘pretty’ toolkits like Qt better once you
master
the default. It also means that you can at least consider things like
game programming which is always interesting. I have been personally
itching to make a sudoku - solver for a while now.
If you are learning programming with a different purpose, to impress
an employer say, or beef up development skills prior to a career
change, you might want to consider more employer-friendly projects
like learning Rails, or database work with Ruby.
Also, can
anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
I find the Euler project full of fun. It consists of mulitpple small
mathematical / programming challenges that typically is solved in about
10
- 20 lines of human readable code. It’s fast in the beginning and hard
at
the end, take a look and see if the quiz is pleasing.
The Ruby Q. page is always a good read – http://www.rubyquiz.com/
It probably would be a good idea to try a few of these as a project, of
sorts. I can’t think of any projects off of the top of my head that
would be fun or good to do. That said, if you come up with an idea,
try it. It can’t hurt.
Aside from that, I’m not really sure. If you use a library you enjoy,
take a look at it’s source code.
I hope this helps a little, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy Ruby. It’s quite
fun =)
James H.
Another good type of project I found useful to learn from is to build
things with public web APIs for services you maybe already use. There
are various RSS and XML parsers for Ruby, and lots of interesting
public APIs kicking around.
One of the first I wrote was pretty simple - a command-line tool that
takes a zip code as input, and gives you the current weather at that
location, using the Yahoo! Weather API (I think, in fact, this came
from a Ruby Q., now I remember 
). So try something like that, or
maybe a tool to spit out your last ten delicious bookmarks, or what
you’ve got on Upcoming in the next ten months.
The “tricky” part is learning how to access the API and parse the
input; you’ll get to know REXML and Net:HTTP (or open-uri) quite well
doing this. You get a nice interactive tool, but don’t have to futz
around with Tk or other GUI tools.
I’ve always found this kind of work satisfying because it solves a
(roughly) real problem withuot spending too much time being distracted
by shaving yaks. And it’s not hard at all - lots of documentation out
there to help you achieve it; this kind of thing is very popular these
days.
So that might be an idea.
t.
On 10/2/06, woodyee [email protected] wrote:
Hi! I’m a newbie to Ruby and programming. Can anyone recommend any
online sources that has Ruby source code available for study? Also, can
anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
I’m completing Chris P.'s Learning to Program book and will start the
Pickaxe book next. Thanks so much!
Playing with DRb and other network stuff is always fun (well, to me,
anyway :).
woodyee wrote:
Hi! I’m a newbie to Ruby and programming. Can anyone recommend any
online sources that has Ruby source code available for study? Also, can
anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
I’m completing Chris P.'s Learning to Program book and will start the
Pickaxe book next. Thanks so much!
try “ruby on rails” and agile “webdevelopment with ruby on rails” (book)
hf