How I Learned Ruby

Toph threw down the gauntlet, and who am I to refuse?

What was your technical background before you started learning Ruby/Rails?

I was a coder, I have a degree in EE and CS. I always liked Scheme a lot, ever since CS 61a at Berkeley, which is the SICP (sick pea) course. I have been a computer geek for as long as I can remember. I even have a great picture of two year old me in front of my family's Apple II.

Toph got very excited about ruby, and he was the main reason I ended up learning it.

How long ago did you start?

About a year ago. I really started to use it at work this year, but Toph and I wrote releasefeed in 2005.

What were the two most useful resources to you in the learning process (not counting The Agile Book or the Pickaxe Book, which we'll assume everyone knows about)?

ruby-doc
google
rails api docs

And also asking people questions. Real corporeal people with whom I am in the same room.

Tell us the story of how you came to learn Rails:

Toph and I built releasefeed to tech ourselves rails. I liked rails enough to choose it for my next side project, walklist. I like it slightly less now, but it's still pretty good.

Three Ruby bloggers to whom you're passing the baton:

Ben Bleything seems not to have done this yet.

I'm out of Ruby bloggers, I would just be reading names from planet planet PDX.rb. In fact, I challenge the rest of PDX.rb. So there.

tech | link | 2006/Jul