Add a Ruby-focused curriculum.

[nuclearsandwich]

There's been continuing discussion on the railsbridge-workshops mailing list about branching the workshops. One topic that I've always wanted to have more literature on is the Ruby language itself. We should have a curriculum that is roughly as long as the Rails app curriculum and ends with "deploying" to GitHub.

Other things that fall under the purvey of this module.

• A Ruby for Rails survival card. (i.e. [1, "mittens", :deleted] is an Array. Arrays are lists. Their size is not fixed, they can grow and shrink. You would use an array to store any many kinds of sequential data.) which covers basic data types and objects, use cases, and how to do things like iteration and conditionals.
• Running Ruby applications from the Terminal
• Writing Rake tasks. Wanna demystify rake? Teach people what it's for and about topographically sorted dependencies (okay maybe not about that BUT IT IS SO COOL)
• How to help yourself using tools like rdoc, gem server, Stack Overflow, and ri. (as discussed in Removed the section about ri, added --no-ri and --no-rdoc flags. #75)
• Testing with Minitest. Because there's less magic in command line Ruby scripts, it will be far more feasible to introduce basic unit testing. Coupled with a lot more irb it should really help with learning via hypothesis.

Lastly, we should work as hard as we can not to reinvent the wheel. Ideally this curriculum would be much more a curation of existing community resources such as @alexch's Ruby stuff, Try Ruby, _w(P)GtR, the Ruby Koans, and the like. There's good stuff out there, we just need to filter it and present it.

I would like to start with a Ruby Survival Card for Railsbridge attendees.

[tjgrathwell]

I took a stab at this in #140, working off the additions Carina had made to the "ruby for beginners" slide deck that we used for the last attempt at a Ruby-only workshop.

It definitely doesn't qualify as "not reinventing the wheel" -- wheels are reinvented all over the place in this. It's definitely incomplete (but still usable enough for a beginner's workshop, maybe) at this time. My goal was mostly to get it up to parity with the slide deck, which I think it has. It still needs an end page with links to some external resources.

I hope maybe committing it will spur someone else on to make it better.

[lilliealbert]

Oh hey, this is a good idea. I think @tjgrathwell's Ruby curriculum is a good place to start, and needs many more exercises. And maybe can have whole pages where everyone takes a meander over to another resource somewhere online.

@nuclearsandwich, you still want to make a Ruby survival card?

[alexch]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2013 at 12:01 AM, Lillie Chilen notifications@github.comwrote:

I think @tjgrathwell https://github.com/tjgrathwell's Ruby curriculum
is a good place to start,

Feel free to raid http://codelikethis.com/lessons

and needs many more exercises.

and http://testfirst.org/live

Alex Chaffee - alex@stinky.com
http://alexchaffee.com
http://twitter.com/alexch

[nuclearsandwich]

@lilliealbert yes. Kinda forgot I had two midterms this week so I won't be looking at a Ruby survival card or installfest touch ups until Thursday afternoon. 📝

[alexch]

FYI i taught a full day "learn to program using ruby" class and want to merge it into the docs repo -- see #295

[alexch]

#322 adds my "learn to code with ruby" curriculum... doesn't do most of the things Steven! asked for in the original issue but it does (along with the "ruby for programmers" deck) accomplish the title

[zspencer]

closed due to #322 being merged.