Richard Conroy
10/2/2006 2:47:00 PM
On 10/2/06, woodyee <wood_yee12@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi! I'm a newbie to Ruby and programming. Can anyone recommend any
> online sources that has Ruby source code available for study? Also, can
> anyone suggest some projects that I can create in Ruby (newbie level)?
> I'm completing Chris Pine's Learning to Program book and will start the
> Pickaxe book next. Thanks so much!
I find projects that give you good and fast feedback are best. Stuff with a
GUI component is important too, so your finished efforts have some
visual presence that you can show off or feel proud of.
Also Ruby has a lot of very powerful APIs for processing network stuff.
You might find one that ties into your real world knowledge of stuff like
Telnet, IRC, RSS, IM etc. Writing client apps for these kinds of services
are good learning points - the protocols are well documented, in many
cases the Ruby libraries take care of a lot of the grunt work, and you
get exposed to important parts of the language like error handling.
If your intention is learning for fun, learn how to make UIs in Ruby.
Ruby ships with a UI toolkit called Tk, which is not pretty, but it means
that you will appreciate the 'pretty' toolkits like Qt better once you master
the default. It also means that you can at least consider things like
game programming which is always interesting. I have been personally
itching to make a sudoku - solver for a while now.
If you are learning programming with a different purpose, to impress
an employer say, or beef up development skills prior to a career
change, you might want to consider more employer-friendly projects
like learning Rails, or database work with Ruby.