The last couple of weeks, I’ve taken upon myself to hunker down and study Ruby. In my free time, I like to brush on on languages and exercise my brain. I completed a few Ruby courses over the summer, but in the last few weeks I needed “reference material.”
On my quest for reference material, I stumbled upon the legendary _why’s Poignant Guide To Ruby on Github! I opted for the PDF version and uploaded it to my Play Books!
Thumbing through _why’s entertaining book, I started looking at other books to quicky kick start Ruby. Many Ruby books I’ve attempted to read through have always turned me off due to their strange lexicon, dry and unclear explanations, etc. Being that I have a background in HTML, Javascript, and PHP, the analogies in most Ruby books/documentation confused me and I often found myself frustrated. All I wanted was simple reference material to explain the Ruby class, examples of syntax, and a comparison to a language I understood.
While I was reading through random online documentation, I found a blog called “Juixe Techknow” which outlined and explained the Ruby class. After reading the first 2 paragraphs, I suddenly got overwhelmed in excitement. A combination of my Woods Coffee kicking in, and sheer enlightenment, Juixe made a great comparison of Ruby class to Java in this blog post. His explanation clicked as I recall working with Android SDK! Now that everything clicked and I was able to bang out a class file with the methods I needed, I was ready to invest $$$.
I’ve always been a fan of Larry Ullman, in fact him and Elizabeth Castro are the two authors of my favorite books. At a young age, I was turned off my “fluff” types of books, such as Dummies series. “I DON’T WANT TO READ A BOOK THAT COMPARES JAVASCRIPT TO BAKING COOKIES, AND TELLING ME A STORY ABOUT HOW A FAMILY NEEDS TO SOLVE FOR (B) WHILE TRAIN TRAVELS AT x” – seriously, Visual Quick Start Guides enabled me to just “Play” with the code, then think creatively.
If you need reference material to quickly pick up Ruby, I’d encourage purchasing Larry Ullman’s Visual Start Guide to Ruby. Whether your a beginner or advanced user needing to look up syntax, I have nothing negative to say for this book. I picked it up on my Nexus, although I do prefer paperback books, it still is good to skim through.
In the long run, I plan on continuing down this path and picking up Ruby On Rails. Right now, my main goal to Ruby is just to work on a client side project. I would soon like to apply this skill set on an AWS Ruby on Rails instance in the near future! I’m sure my friend @eminkel will enjoy collaborating on a side project!
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