adam-gligor monologue about stuff, brain dump

Ruby lang learning resources

I only know only a few languages o far so one of these days I got curious about ruby and decided to read a book and learn the basics.

Here are some resources.

Learning ruby - the language

Codewars is a gamified way of learning a programming language. You complete small code challenges and gain points and level up. It was just what I was looking for, it also had a lot of hits in google search so I signed up.

What I like about it is that after completing a challenge you are presented with the best solutions for that challenge, thus a nice way of learning from others.

What I like less is that coding happens in the browser and it’s not the best place to experiment while building up a solution, that plus I wanted to store my code on github for future reference.

Fortunately others thought of this as well and came up with a solution to code from your editor of choice.

Codewars client is a client for the api exposed by codewars, it’s written in node.

These are the steps to install the tools:

and then the way of working is as follows …

  • codewars train -l ruby - start a new kata
  • codewars print > kata.txt - save the description for reference
  • codewars verify kata.rb - test the solution
  • codewars submit kata.rb - submit the solution
  • commit & push to github
  • check the codewars website and review the best solutions

Learning Rails - the web framework

For learning the rails framework I started with the railstutorial. It’s a book designed around learning by doing. The nice part is that by using cloud9 the infrastructure and tooling comes out of the box and you can focus on learning rails. You will be deploying a functioning app to heroku starting from chapter 1.

  • ruby reference link
  • codewars link
  • codewars api client link
  • rails tutorial (by Michael Hartl) link
  • cloud9 link
  • heroku link