Learning Ruby

Well, I dove in today. I'm tired of not knowing a programming language. HTML and a little bit of JavaScript only get you so far... and that's not very far. So, I'm learning Ruby (hopefully Ruby on Rails eventually too).

I found this great little program (originally aimed at teaching kids how to program) called Hackety Hack that walks you through several lessons and helps you build some real-life applications. It's been awhile since I've done much hardcore self teaching, so this kind of pace helped me quite a bit. It was frustrating however, because a lot of the code in the lessons just plain didn't work like it apparently was supposed to. So I wasn't sure if it was my mistake, or Why's (whytheluckystiff.net, who built the application). Either way, I know more now than I did at the beginning of today, which is nice. I just hope I can do what I'd like to with what I learn. (I seem to always have too high of expectations.)

I also ordered this book called Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, which I hear is supposed to be really good. You can actually read the entire first edition of the book online for free at this link, I just got tired of reading my screen.