New to Ruby
9 views
Skip to first unread message
Bianca C
Jul 23, 2015, 10:01:44 AM7/23/15
to Cape Town Ruby Brigade
I live in South Africa and I am interested in finding out more about Ruby as a programming language and will consider learning it if I get good feedback on it. Where is the best place to start?
De Wet Blomerus
Jul 23, 2015, 10:41:59 AM7/23/15
to cape-town-r...@googlegroups.com, bin...@mweb.co.za
Giving you "good feedback" on Ruby depends what you want to use it for.
If you want to build websites that does unique things (things you can't find a Wordpress Plugin for). And if your main constraint is money (which equials programmer hours), so it has to be done by one person or a small team in a limited amount of time, then it just so happens that Rails which is a framework written & built upon with Ruby is the best tool for the job. It can do many other things well, but for this use case I'll argue it is the very best.
The other places where Ruby really shines are making scripts for text processing & setting up of servers.
Double bonus, Ruby is fun to learn & work with. And there are tons of video tutorials online.
This has been my favorite
If you don't have the budget for it I have heard really good things about this guy's free book
On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Bianca C <bin...@mweb.co.za> wrote:
I live in South Africa and I am interested in finding out more about Ruby as a programming language and will consider learning it if I get good feedback on it. Where is the best place to start?
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cape Town Ruby Brigade" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cape-town-ruby-br...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Fritz Meissner
Jul 23, 2015, 5:07:46 PM7/23/15
to cape-town-r...@googlegroups.com
You were probably expecting somewhat biased feedback given that this
is a Ruby list, so here it is: Ruby makes me smile.
But I can be more helpful and nuanced than that:
It depends on where you're coming from. If you've only enountered
business-y web-y Java or C#, then Ruby will be a breath of fresh air
and (especially in the Java case) will expose you to "new" ideas that
will help you move your programming skills forward. Once you "get" it,
you will find yourself much more happy and productive than before.
On the other hand, if your thing is writing code that is as fast as
possible using as few bytes of memory as possible, you will want to
look elsewhere. Bear in mind though that there are many many problems
out there for which developer productivity is more important than
saving a few bytes here and there.
Also be aware that you won't ever be able to hit pause on learning.
Even for the web where Ruby is most popular, you would need to learn
some (actually, a lot of) Javascript in order to give the kids the
kind of experience that they have become used to with Facebook. Then
if you get to a stage where performance actually is important, you
will want to be able to handle bits and bytes in C, or (probably more
likely these days) find something that lends itself to multi/parallel
processing.
Tell us more about what you've tried already and or what you want to
do and we can give you more helpful feedback.
is a Ruby list, so here it is: Ruby makes me smile.
But I can be more helpful and nuanced than that:
It depends on where you're coming from. If you've only enountered
business-y web-y Java or C#, then Ruby will be a breath of fresh air
and (especially in the Java case) will expose you to "new" ideas that
will help you move your programming skills forward. Once you "get" it,
you will find yourself much more happy and productive than before.
On the other hand, if your thing is writing code that is as fast as
possible using as few bytes of memory as possible, you will want to
look elsewhere. Bear in mind though that there are many many problems
out there for which developer productivity is more important than
saving a few bytes here and there.
Also be aware that you won't ever be able to hit pause on learning.
Even for the web where Ruby is most popular, you would need to learn
some (actually, a lot of) Javascript in order to give the kids the
kind of experience that they have become used to with Facebook. Then
if you get to a stage where performance actually is important, you
will want to be able to handle bits and bytes in C, or (probably more
likely these days) find something that lends itself to multi/parallel
processing.
Tell us more about what you've tried already and or what you want to
do and we can give you more helpful feedback.
Steve Barnett
Jul 24, 2015, 3:08:28 AM7/24/15
to Cape Town Ruby Brigade, bin...@mweb.co.za
There's a big list of resources here: http://docs.railsbridgecapetown.org/workshop/resources .
There will also be a RailsBridge event in Cape Town in a few months time. Keep an eye out here: http://www.meetup.com/RailsBridge-Cape-Town/.
Re good feedback: it depends what you want to do / build, but as the others have said -it is definitely fun to work with. :)
Regards,
Steve
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages