Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

I’m a little late posting about the event, but I attended the 2010 Cincinnati Day of Ruby event. The first half of the day was spent being introduced to Ruby Koans, and the second part of the day was taking a running jump at Ruby on Rails. I can safely say that Ruby Koans is hands down the best way I’ve ever found of learning a new programming language from scratch.

If you’ve never seen the Koans it’s basically a single program consisting of several Ruby files each consisting of testable blocks of code. Within each code file are multiple fill-in-the-blanks unit tests requiring the user to fix in order to move onto the next broken section of code to complete the Koans. You begin at the core aspects of the language, simple data types, exceptions, functions, classes, and so on. It’s really a bottoms-up approach to learning a language where you gradually expand your understanding in a test driven manner.

Ruby on rails I won’t touch with a ten foot pole at the moment. That was a walking disaster for anyone on a Windows machine. Luckily I had the forethought to bring my Ubuntu netbook. Still my only complaint against Ruby in general is not so much with Ruby itself but with Ruby’s other frameworks. The language is neat, and Nil is an object not actually null as we know it. How cool is that? Anyway, I really enjoyed the event, and have a greater understanding of Ruby because of the event. Win win.