If you’ve been following along for a while, you know I’m on a quest to learn Ruby and specifically – Ruby on Rails. Back in May I started on Sam’s Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days. After the fourth time through day 15, I knew I needed some other assistance. The inspiration to find the …
Category Archives: Ruby on Rails
Setting up a Web Development Environment in Tiger
This message means the upgrade is complete. Last week I started the upgrade Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” around the house. To my pleasant surprise, it went extremely smoothly. The most tedious and frustrating part was waiting for my newly enclosed external hard drive to copy tens of gigs of files back and forth for …
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Learning Ruby – Day 14
Day 14 – Blocks, Procs, and the Others I get it. Seven pages into Day 14 trying to figure out what other meant in Slagell’s examples and it clicks. In other languages I’m familiar with (Applescript, PHP, Perl, REALbasic) variables are passed through methods. Example if we have a method that’s friendly, function SayHiTo($name) { …
Learning Ruby – Day 13
Day 13 – Putting the Pieces together Alright, we’re back to Ruby. My apologies for slowing down, and with only 8 days to go. Let’s jump right into day 13. On the outset, Slagell explains the notion of Ruby being a ‘glue language’, like Perl. A language coordinating multiple programs or processes. Historically, AppleScript has …
Learning Ruby – Day 12
Day 12 – When repeating yourself is the preferred method is repeating yourself. Today’s topic is recursion – iteratively calling a function numerous times with a single minor change. On face value, it sounds like something computer technology should help us avoid. In addition, it seems to directly conflict the Ruby on Rails mantra Don’t …
Learning Ruby – Day 11
Day 11 – Program organization, Part 3 of 3. Today, Slagell clarifies the difference between classes and modules. As I mentioned back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, a ‘class’ in object-oriented programming is a noun, a Thing. Like a chair, a sweater, or Slartibartfast. Modules are like adjectives. All the nouns I …
Learning Ruby – Day 10
Day 10 – Program organization, Part 2 of 3. As an experienced information architect, I’m familiar with the challenges of declaring an organizational structure. Whether its for books, furniture, clothing, or software, every structure has it’s biases – somethings are easier, others more difficult. With this in mind, the goal is always to net a …
Learning Ruby – Day 9
Day 9 – Program organization, Part 1 of 3. Back in my review of The Object-Oriented Thought Process, I talked about the difference between is a and has a in programming world. Dave was then kind enough to clarify. Today’s chapter was that. In practical, We’re-Writing-Code terms, rather than the abstract, This-is-How-To-Think-About-It way of the …
Learning Ruby – Day 8
Day 8, What are regular expressions? If you don’t know about regular expression matching, or regex, it’s basically a language to find the useful needles in haystacks of text and code. Think ‘find and replace’ turned to 11. I do just enough regular expression matching to forget how it works. I always end up googling …
Learning Ruby – Day 7
Day 7, playing catch-up. I’m continually impressed with how concise the Ruby language is. As I mentioned in Day 4, Ruby frowns upon loops. I’m getting the impression Ruby also frowns upon taking up 2 or more lines to describe an action. Slagell’s examples of doing something a traditional way take up multiple lines, his …