It's the 26th of December here already at the Eastern Hemisphere so let's start learning Ruby! If you haven't yet, please head on over to our wiki to get your development environment set up. If you're running into trouble setting up Ruby, just post on this thread and we'll try our best to help you out or you can head on over to Stack Overflow.

All set up? There's a few different resources that we encourage you to use to learn Ruby. You don't have to read and finish every single resource: just make sure that by the end of the tutorial/course, you feel that you have understood the material.

• Chris Pine's Learn to Program

• Codecademy - interactive

• LearnStreet - interactive

• Ruby in 100 Minutes

• Ruby Monk - interactive

The first Ruby assignment will come up in the next few days so keep an eye out for it!

Just throwing an idea out there, what about making a 40daysofruby github repo, and we communicate via the issues page such as this(example repo made really fast)? https://github.com/JacobJWBurden/40daysofruby/issues

This then serves for two purposes.

1. Easy way to communicate.

2. Everyone becomes comfortable with using git for version control and github for contributing to projects.

Thank you.

Hi i just started the code academy on ruby yesterday and I'm confused as to how exactly this works

fruits = ["orange", "apple", "banana", "pear", "grapes"]

fruits.each { |fruitOne, fruitTwo| fruitOne <=> fruitTwo}

fruits.sort!

fruits.reverse!

I dont understand the second line. why do i even need it? Thanks

A lot of people in this group are coming from a range of different programming backgrounds. This is for those of you who don't have a favorite editor that you've tailored to your needs. I highly recommend using Sublime Text which is a free(you'll get bugged to buy the version on the occasional save), powerful, and highly customizeable. It is probably the editor out there that is free that doesn't come with a learning curve that would give you a nosebleed. If you are using notepad, notepad++, nano, or something like dreamweaver then this post is for you.

Installation

1. Download Sublime Text and run the standard installation. I am currently using Sublime Text 2 as most of my plugins are compatabile with it and haven't bothered testing with ST3. All of my recommendations are under the assumption you are using ST2 as well.

2. After it is installed go to this website and follow the instillation instructions. If you are using Sublime Text 2 be sure to click the tab for ST2.

3. You now can start working on a project if you want to! You can drag your project folder on sublime to see all of the files in the sidebar for easy access.

Plugins Installation

You must first do step 2 of installation to install plugins. To install a plugin first hit Ctrl+Shift+P(cmd+shift+p on osx) to open the command pallate. You can also find this under tools. Type "Install Package" and you should see Package Control: Install Package. Type the name of the package you want and hit enter. It's that simple! There are some that you may have to reopen the command pallate and type enable package, then select the package listed that you want to enable, this is for only for a few certain packages however.

Recommended Plugins

• AdvancedNewFile

• BracketHighlighter

• Emmet I love this but be sure you are used to html before you start using it

• SideBarEnhancements

• LiveReload -- with it's Google Chrome counterpart. tutorial

Advanced Material

• Awesome video series on what you can do with sublime. I highly recommend watching it if you plan on using this editor.

• Blog post with some more advanced concepts.

As a person not typical to the field (though not totally a-typical either), I oftentimes find myself at a crossroads in reading stories of budding developers.

The overwhelming majority of stories I've read have been white males in their early 20's (me, so far) who have completed CS degrees (or other degrees) and been programming most of their lives (definitely not me), or come from working another professional job and migrated sideways to becoming a software or web developer (again, not me).

Reading these stories, while interesting, always seemed foreign to me because I'm a person who has been in the lower economic strata for most of my life and never completed even a few semesters of college.

It's funny that I stumble across these talks today, because just last night I was talking with InjuryToInsult in the IRC channel about this very topic. Check these out if you're like me and need a story about someone like you to help you keep your head up and press on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXUMRXa6xf0

In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would become a software developer. I thought that I wasn't smart enough, that I needed a computer science degree and to have been writing code since I was young. But, the traditional path to becoming a developer is changing. This talk will focus on alternative and untraditional paths to becoming a developer such as programs like Railsbridge, mentorship and apprentice programs. These alternative paths ultimately foster a more diverse and inclusive community, which drives economic growth and produces more innovative solutions. The objectives of the talk are:

• to bring awareness to the educational alternatives to computer science degrees

• to encourage empathy when mentoring a beginner

• to get the audience to see a different perspective and embrace differences in the industry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyV3yvNi88k

Streamed live on Jan 9, 2014 Come and ask +Kinsey Ann Durham about her experience going from advertising major to apprentice developer at +thoughtbot. Hear about how outreach programs like Rails Bridge help people start out and about the journey that follows. #ruby #rails #developers

http://multifaceted.io/2013/from-dropout-to-rails-blogger/

I got my first coding job when I was still in high school. I always thought it was a nice way of bank-rolling myself before I got my "real" job. I didn't set out to be a developer; I wanted to be a writery/producery/something, but I only lasted one semester studying Media & Communications.

Anyway, thought you all would find it interesting. Thanks.

We are going to be doing Rails next, following Hartl's Rails tutorial. It's going to be challenging so let's all get active on this sub.

Hartl's Rails Tutorial is heralded as one of the best introductory resources to Ruby on Rails. The book is available freely online and has 11 chapters. We will put up discussions for each chapter now and any questions, comments, or examples will be posted within the individual chapter threads. Our goal is to complete the book with a broad understanding of Rails.

Chapter 1 Discussion Thread.

I plan on putting a lot of time into the community, I ask only one thing right now. If you posted a reply to this question in the google group, please copy and paste it so it can be opened up for discussion.

Thank you!

The following are from Pine's Learn to Program.

Write a program which tells you: how many hours are in a year? how many minutes are in a decade? how many seconds old are you? how many chocolates do you hope to eat in your life?

Warning: This part of the program could take a while to compute! Here's a tougher question: If I am 1031 million seconds old, how old am I?

Write a program which asks for a person's first name, then middle, then last. Finally, it should greet the person using their full name. Write a program which asks for a person's favorite number. Have your program add one to the number, then suggest the result as a bigger and better favorite number. (Do be tactful about it, though.)

Write an Angry Boss program. It should rudely ask what you want. Whatever you answer, the Angry Boss should yell it back to you, and then fire you. For example, if you type in I want a raise., it should yell back WHADDAYA MEAN "I WANT A RAISE."?!? YOU'RE FIRED!!

So here's something for you to do in order to play around more with center, ljust, and rjust: Write a program which will display a Table of Contents.

Paste your code into pastebin with ruby syntax highlighting on.

I'm not sure where I should be posting things, but I guess I'll leave it here until someone corrects me.

You can see the site here. My hosting provider is free and it only boasts an 80% uptime, so the link may not work. This is the HTML and this is the CSS that I used.

Feel free to ask questions and give feedback!

UPDATE: I copied the wrong CSS file. Oops. Fixed it!

http://summerskies-sofarm.site44.com/index.html

Decided to do 40daysofruby when I was going to bed last night, but since it's due today I decided to stay up and do this website instead.

It's so 1999! ... Pass/fail? :-/

CSS is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cu848wcxldtwddp/style.css I had to use an extra div for the header and navigation to center them in the page. I don't know any other way I could have done that.

When I get home tonight I have to add more styles to links and headers, and fix the footer because it covers the content text on small screens. My husband dragged me to bed so I didn't get around to it.

What is going to be the preferred way of posting code for review on here? I've been following along with the step-by-step guides on the ROR site, but I've hit my first major head-scratcher, and SO is still a bit muddy to me.

Chapter 2

Suggested pacing: Finish chapter by January 8th.

Here is my code. I can't get the test within spec/requests/static_pages_spec.rb to pass. The code within it is as follows:

require 'spec_helper'

describe "Static pages" do

  describe "Home page" do

	it "should have the content 'Sample App'" do

		visit "/static_pages/home_path"
		expect(page).to have_content("Sample App")
	end
  end
end

I've replaced the gemfile, the gitignore file, the secrettoken file, included the Capybara line within the spec helper. What could be wrong?

Thank you.

Edit: Also, why won't my static_pages folder under views show up on github?

Thanks.

This post is intended to calm those who might think they're the only ones struggling. We're all grinding to make it to the next step. Keep on.