[LRUG] May Meeting - Specifics

[Tom Stuart]

On 1 May 2007, at 09:51, Murray Steele wrote:
> It's become obvious that the idea of a beginners session is a good  
> one, but also, a tad unspecific as everyone has different needs,  
> and hence a little difficult to stage. [...] I hope this lack of a  
> proper session isn't too disappointing to any beginners.

I hope this will be taken as polite and pragmatic (which is the  
intention) rather than rude and inconsiderate (which isn't), but:  
there seem to be at least a few people who have little or no Ruby  
experience at all, and I'm not convinced that mentoring is a good use  
of either party's time in those cases.

Mentoring is best applied when there's some grit in the oyster, so to  
speak: "I pretty much know what I'm doing, but I came up against this  
weird problem/situation/feeling the other day, so can you give me the  
benefit of your experience?"

There are already plenty of really, really good Ruby-beginner  
resources freely available on the web, and increasingly there are  
some Rails ones too, although those tend to still be somewhat  
fragmented and cast to the four corners of the blogosphere. In many  
cases these tutorials are the distilled result of careful thinking  
and editing on the part of their authors, and are therefore likely to  
hit home much more rapidly and effectively than someone trying to  
sketch out the syntax of blocks on the back of a fag packet down the  
pub.

Therefore would it be useful to compile a list of *recommended* Ruby/ 
Rails-newbie resources, so that people can at least break the ice of  
their total unfamiliarity with the language/framework and so put  
themselves in the best position to actively pick the brains of their  
mentors?

http://www.ruby-lang.org/ is of course a good place to start,  
although potentially a little overwhelming due to the sheer number of  
largely undifferentiated links on the 'books' and 'documentation' pages.

That being said, if I could communicate a single URL to every Ruby  
beginner in the world, it would be http://tryruby.hobix.com/, where  
you can type away merrily into a browser-based Ruby interpreter while  
the page makes friendly suggestions about what to try next. Of course  
any Windows-using Ruby newbies would probably get similar value out  
of http://hacketyhack.net/ but I haven't been able to try that in the  
absence of an OS X version.

Any other good ones? (Note: personally I wouldn't want to inflict the  
first edition of the Pickaxe on anyone.)

Cheers,
-Tom