Roy's Techblog

I’ve recently been exploring Ruby. I thought that I’d try my hand at blogging with a purpose. That said, I’m going to blog my progress as I learn this intriguing language.  <br />
Ruby describes itself as a mix of Smalltalk, Python, and Perl.  Some of its syntax seems weird and awkward at first, but I feel part of that is due to the fact that its even more lax than Perl about its syntax.  One of the challenges I faced was finding a decent set of examples showing the syntax and quirks of the language in action.  I originally tried to use the online version of Programming Ruby, but I found that it was not a great choice for me.  I need examples, and plenty of them.

I managed to overcome some of the limitations of this gude through general surfing (I wish I’d kept track of those web pages), and through playing with irb.  Irb is neat.  I think it stands for Interactive Ruby.  Its a shell-like interface to Ruby.  If you enable tab completion, then irb becomes even more valuable to the learner, as you can explore the classes, variables, and methods more easily.
<br />More recently, I found a rather oddly written book, Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby.  I find the banter to be horribly annoying, but after the first chapter I learned to skip over it.  Buried in between inane and unnecessary blather, there’s tons of examples, with decent explanations to boot.  I think Why could reduce the size of the book by over 75% and call it Why’s Concice Guide to Ruby instead.

Something else I played with is Ruby on Rails. I walked through the first two tutorials (first, second).  I’m not sure I like how automagically it does some of the database stuff, but I intend to learn how it works so I can override it all.  I’ll post about that when I learn about it.  For now, though, the most interesting thing I got was from scanning through Amy’s blog entry about the MVC: Most Vexing Conundrum.  MVC or Model View Controller is a design model that I intend to learn more about.

For now though, I’m still making my way through Why’s guide.