How I Came to Love Ruby

It wasn’t so long ago that I had no idea how everything worked in world of WWW. But that all changed when I got a technical support job at IntelligentBee. Working in a web development company (even though your job doesn’t have any tangency to the actual development role) opens a whole set of learning opportunities that will ultimately describe a whole new wonderful world. From that point on, my task was pretty simple: be curious about how stuff works and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Why Ruby ? It’s incredibly similar to English. Yes, to the actual English language. And this makes it extremely intuitive and easy to learn. Don’t believe me ? To loop through an array, in most programming languages you would need to use a “for” loop. Not here. Ruby uses the “.each” phrasing to loop through arrays. So it basically tells you, from the get-go, that it will iterate through each element of that array in the most intuitive and simple fashion.

numbers_array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

numbers_array.each do |number|    
  puts "#{number}"
end

Believe me now ?

At first, it’s a great idea to have a clear view (an interface) on the work you’re doing. Even though you’re just displaying a simple string on the screen, like “Hello World!”, actually viewing it on a browser somewhere will shortly come to empower you. After trolling around on sites like Codecademy and Codeschool – which are great tools for learning the basic structure of a programming language, like Ruby (and even give you that shiny interface I was talking about), I became even more curious. So I started gathering even more material and, one happy day, found Michael Hartl’s “Ruby on Rails Tutorial” book (available for free here: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/) which shortly became a sort-of dictionary for me. It laid a great foundation on the whole newly acquired Framework concept and how it will eventually simplify a developer’s life. I even learned about quirky notions such as MVC (model-view-controller) and TDD (test driven development). Fun times. Even now, two fully developed Rails apps later, I refer back to this book whenever I want to make more sense out of a ruby/rails function. Safe to say I’m pretty happy I found this :).

Another cool thing about Rails is that it has a thriving online community. Stackoverflow is full of Rails problems and (what’s even more awesome) such explicit answers to these problems, that even a wannabe programmer, like me, can understand them. This great community alone stopped my mind from exploding several times. Great success.

So, you silent reader, that is unsure whether or not to start coding – my advice to you is do it now! The more knowledge driven you are, the better world you can build for your children. If this convinced you on starting to code, here are a couple of resources to help you get going:

Codecademy: http://www.codecademy.com/

Learn ruby the hard way: http://ruby.learncodethehardway.org/book/

Railscasts: http://railscasts.com

..and, of course, let’s not forget about Ruby and Rails’ official documentation:

Rails – http://api.rubyonrails.org/

Ruby – http://ruby-doc.org/

If you read all these and stay curious – you’ll be a developer in no time at all :).

Happy coding!