Learning Ruby – Day 4

Day 4 – Iterators.

First, all chapters in programming books should start with quotes from Steve Martin (t).

Second, what’s a language without a convoluted loop syntax to geek out on? Geeez. I thought the purpose of learning to program was the same as learning Arabic from the Defense Language Institute – “because you can’t.” Ruby has iterators for logical, readable code? This means I might actually get something built rather than just debugging loops.

I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy Slagell’s writing. I also like how the solutions to the exercises are listed immediately after the exercises. This isn’t typical, at in my collection of programming books. It makes getting un-stuck and getting the point much quicker.

Tip: Here’s how I’m remembering how the ‘step’ iterator works:

start.step(to, by)


an example to display all the odd numbers from 5 to -15

5.step(-15, -2)


Quite a few years back I was talking with a programmer/designer (in contrast to my designer/programmer) who didn’t like AppleScript because it was “too much like English”. With syntax like:

• 3.times to do something, well, 3 times and
• 10.downto(1) to count down from 10 to 1

I don’t think he’d like Ruby for the exact same reason – if not more so.

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This post documents my journey through Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 days. I’ll be joining Al Abut in his effort to learn Ruby and blog along the way.

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