Ruby course proposal (Was: Re: [Techtalk] ruby course?)

Laurel Fan laurel.fan at gmail.com
Sat Oct 8 03:07:06 EST 2005


Ok, it does sound like there's plenty of interest in Ruby, so here's a
proposal.  If it sounds reasonable to most people, I'll go ahead and
do all the formal stuff to set up a course, come up with more concrete
dates, etc.

Let's start out with the basics of Ruby, following the book
Programming Ruby (aka Pickaxe).  Those who want to buy the book can
use the second edition, here:
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ruby/index.html
and those who do not want to buy it can use the free first edition, here:
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/index.html

We can cover the first 10 chapters or so of that book, at the rate of
one or two a week (if that ends up too fast or too slow, we can change
it, of course).   I'm thinking that will end up being 6-8
weeks/lessons.  Most of the rest of the book is either a reference
manual or covers more advanced/specific topics.  I'll make up
assignments for each week, and be available for questions, but it'll
be pretty low key, more of a study group rather than a class.

After we have the basics down, we can go into more fun stuff, like
Rails, web services, and whatever other topics anyone is interested in
learning about or gathering links about.  A lot of this stuff is well
documented on the web, so it won't require purchasing books or
anything, but if anyone likes buying books, I recommend the ones by
Pragmatic Programmers (who are responsible for the Pickaxe):
http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/index.html

There is a title on Rails and lots of non-Ruby programming books.

--
Laurel Fan
http://dreadnought.gorgorg.org


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