Getting started with Ruby – TOC

dhruvasagar

2010-12-24

3 min read

Hi,

I have written a series of articles (in several parts) in an attempt to guide beginners to get comfortable with Ruby. This article is my attempt to build a TOC (Table of Contents) for it to act as an index for people to get a brief idea regarding what each article is about and help them get to the sections they are interested in.

Getting started with Ruby - Part 1: In this article I begin with an introduction to myself and my motivation behind writing these articles. I give an introduction to Ruby, about how to get started with building your development environment and introduce a few tools that ship along with Ruby which will make your life that much better.
Getting started with Ruby - Part 2: In this article I introduce Ruby in slightly more detail and I get started with describing different data types in Ruby. I cover Strings and Numbers in this article.
Getting started with Ruby - Part 3: In this article I continue from my previous article describing data types in Ruby and cover Ranges and Arrays.
Getting started with Ruby - Part 4: In this article I continue further and cover Hashes, one of the most commonly used data types in Ruby. I also introduce blocks and about using blocks with functions.
Getting started with Ruby - Part 5: In this article I move onto describing various looping constructs in Ruby, and also various flow control modifiers in Ruby. After that I introduce Variables, Symbols, Constants, Methods and Global Variables in Ruby.
Getting started with Ruby - Part 6: After having covered basics of various constructs in Ruby, I considered it better to take a problem statement and solve it in Ruby to bring most of what we’ve discussed into use. I chose Google Codejam 2009′s qualification round problem – Alien Language

I tried to be clear, precise and specific. My intention was write more code than to waste time in trying to explain and so I’ve used code comments to help people understand what each part of the code is meant to do. I have plans on going further and go onto describing classes & modules, sometime soon, even though I expected more people to read and give their feedback, but owing to a lot of work and hence a lack of time, I haven’t been able to do much justice to the same, but hopefully I will be able to do so very soon. I hope it helps people appreciate Ruby and motivate them to learn and understand it.