Ruby & I: A New Journey

I’m taking a crack at learning some Ruby (with the intentions of eventually developing a Rails application). I’ve always been interested in programming (I’m not counting HTML & CSS - which are markup languages), but after a disastrous meeting with Visual Basic in college, I’ve felt lost in the sea of OOP. For the past couple of years, I’ve worked with students using MIT’s Scratch as a fun, snap ’n play way of developing video games. While I certainly haven’t learn programming from Scratch, it did get me excited and gave me the necessary kick in the pants. So, I’m sitting down with a few books and online tutorials, putting my head down and pushing through. The most fun of which is Why the Lucky Stiff’s “‘Poignant’ Guide to Ruby,” which beautifully summarizes my intentions:

Ruby will teach you to express your ideas through a computer. You will be writing stories for a machine.

Creative skills, people. Deduction. Reason. Nodding intelligently. The language will become a tool for you to better connect your mind to the world.

I like where this is heading. See you on the other side.