[LRUG] May Meeting - Specifics

[Paul Ardeleanu]

Hi Tom,

Totally agree... the mentoring should extend beyond those
minutes/hours spent at LRUG. And since the best way to learn a new
programming language is to have a concrete project... what about
giving a project to each mentoree and have a mentor helping them
(similar with Google Summer of Code) ?

There is a good list of Rails tutorials at:
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-rails-tutorials

Cheers,
Paul

On 03/05/07, Tom Stuart <tom at experthuman.com> wrote:
> 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
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