Learning Ruby

After spending most of yesterday trudging up and down swampy, beaver dammed flats along the North fork of the Snake river near Keystone (no pics, cloudy day) in a fruitless search for trout, I’m taking it easy today and decided to do something I’ve meant to do for a while now: start coding a bit. Nothing significant, mind you – as mentioned before, I’m far too lazy to ever be a good developer – but enough to at least be able to get my hands dirty with some of the tools and languages that have evolved since I was last hacking around with the likes of VB script, PHP, Powerbuilder, and, yes, not too long ago, COBOL.

After debating what language to try and jump back in with, I settled on Ruby (sorry Ryan ;). The reasoning was simple: I wanted something dead simple and easy to learn, with a sizable community behind it. Java and C# were out on the first score – highly productive languages both, but a bit ambitious for my initial reentry into the programming world. Still on the radar where Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. I’ve got some experience with Perl and PHP having run into them here and there, and given that I can usually at least figure out what’s being done if not create new applications from scratch, I passed on these two because I wanted to learn from a blank slate. That left Python and Ruby, and while I have a lot of respect for Python (that’s what Portage is written in, so how could I not?), I’ve been too impressed by the productivity that developers are claiming with Ruby to ignore it. So Ruby it is.

Because I’ll be doing this on my spare time, I expect progress to be very slow. But having made it through data structures in this primer in less than an hour and a half this morning, I have to say that Ruby’s ease of use is everything that I expected it to be and more. From loops to arrays, everything in Ruby is simple, and operates just as you’d expect. Apart from a relative dearth of Ruby texts (Tattered Cover doesn’t have any, nor did Powell’s when I visited their booth at OSCON) that I expect to be remedied very shortly, the availability of tutorials and other learning materials on the web and elsewhere is excellent.

Will have more on my adventures with Ruby periodically (and probably infrequently).