iSean

This is spring break week for me. What could be more fun during spring break than learning how to program? Heh heh. That’s what I am doing. I bought this book (called learn to program). It’s all about teaching Ruby to the newbies of the world. I am a newbie. The last “programming” I did was back in the 80s when BASIC was popular. I loved BASIC, but the other language I explored since then have been far from basic.

So, I got Ruby installed on my Mac (along with several other necessities). I am already up to page 71 of 140+ and so far so good. It’s making sense and I think much of it is easier than I expected. Of course, I can’t really do much at this point.

Why am I learning Ruby? I want to build Web 2.0 applications that are useful to me and Ruby tends to be preferred by many developers. Plus, I watched a demo of a programmer making his own blogging tool and it literally took about 15 minutes to create and he was explaining what he was doing along the way. The actual code could have been completed by him in about 5 minutes (58 lines of code). I want a browser window that opens each of my student’s blogs and allows me to add comments, but it should also have check boxes that I can click to indicate whether the blog entry was completed or not and whether any points were deducted. And, I want it to create a comma-delimited text file that I can download and import into Excel to transfer to Blackboard (Bb), which is the tool I use to keep track of student grades. My process is fairly cumbersome right now and I use a lot of tabbed browsing to try and view and grade the blog entries. It’s fairly easy to lose my place and all that jazz, so hopefully this programming experiment pays off. I am hoping to figure it out by spring semester (May).

Fortunately, my hosting company (BlueHost) supports Ruby on Rails. So, once I get things tested on my Mac, I should be able to transfer code to the server fairly seamlessly. Fingers crossed.

Tags: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, programming, Bluehost