So I decided to wake up sort of early on a Saturday morning and haul some a$$ to downtown TO (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) to get re-acquainted with the object-oriented programming (OOP) language Ruby.
For all you programmers who are into Tag Team. “OOP! There it is. OOP! There it is.”
— Karen (@MakintheBacon1) June 17, 2015
Prior to taking my part-time web development course, I only knew of Ruby the red gem and that song by the Kaiser Chiefs. I only heard of that song from playing a ton of GuitarHero (Level of difficulty-beg-med) back in my university days.
During that section, I discovered that I enjoyed learning about Ruby and how to use it more than I did learning about HTML/CSS. Hence, I decided to get a Ruby review. While I did draw/doodle a lot growing up, was considered a good artist and did well in the two art classes I took, I feel as if I don’t have that much of an eye for designing web pages. It’s amazing that art and technology can hold hands and create something beautiful for everyone to see but I learned you need other languages to make the web pages more dynamic.
This is taken from the official Ruby website :
Ruby is…
“A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write.”
I’m more of a complete Ruby Noobie, but I find that the syntax I’ve learned thus far seems to make sense and you can guess what a lot of it means. For example, when you add the command .upcase , to a string, Ruby changes all the letters to uppercase. Makes sense, right?
Apparently, it’s one of the easier programming languages to learn when you’re first learning to code. During the ruby workshop went through a lot of material with a lot of running pre-made ruby files to see how the code would run. What I really liked was that at the end of each section, they had a recap slide where they would review the concepts/definitions we learned in that particular section. There were a couple of exercises where we would look at some code and had to guess what the output was line by line before we actually ran it. I enjoyed doing that because it was a good way to test ourselves to see if we really understood the syntax.
Closer to the end of the ruby workshop we were put to the test and had to create a program from scratch. There was lots of time to complete it and lots of help from TAs. I did my best to attempt it myself, try different things and get errors. Then try more different things and get other errors. Then repeat. After several rounds of trying, I asked for help from a TA, but not without explaining first what I was trying to do and my thinking behind it.
I like how Ruby can do all these cool things such as asking for input and display a certain output based on in your input. Or perform mathematical functions. Or make apps.
Ahh I love that song! Didn’t realise it was on Guitar Hero.
I’ve definitely heard positive things about Ruby (the language and the community around it). That said…
“I like how Ruby can do all these cool things such as asking for input and display a certain output based on in your input. Or perform mathematical functions. Or make apps.”
Isn’t that kind of the point of programming – isn’t that what it IS? Like, that’s not specific to a language is it? (noob question perhaps)
From one noob to another noob: I think you’re right, overall. I could be wrong on this and I haven’t explored the other languages, but perhaps certain languages are for certain parts of the app, depending on what the app does? I always thought in general, different languages did different things.
I’ve heard people refer to using html/css more for “web design” vs “web programming”. Or how web design is front-end development and web programming is more back-end development.
Perhaps a professional in the industry could provide an explanation or better insight?