Programming With Ruby Episode 3, Getting Help/Tools

Covered in this episode:

  • How to get help
  • Google
  • Ruby’s Documentation
  • Forums/Mailing Lists
  • Blogs on Ruby
  • Text Editors
  • Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)

Links:

Ruby-Lang: http://www.ruby-lang.org
Ruby-Doc:  http://www.ruby-doc.org/

Forums:

http://www.ruby-forum.com/
http://www.rubyforums.com/

Text Editors:
Notepad++ http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
SciTE http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
jEdit http://www.jedit.org/
Text Mate http://macromates.com/

IDEs
Netbeans http://www.netbeans.org/
Aptana Rad Rails http://www.aptana.com/
FreeRIDE http://rubyforge.org/projects/freeride/
Geany http://www.geany.org/
More… http://rubyforge.org/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=65

Transcript

Hello Everybody! And Welcome to Programming with Ruby Episode 3, Getting Help
and Tools. I’m your presenter, Tyler. This video is brought to you by
manwithcode.com

Covered in this Episode.
I’ll be going over how to get help.
If you ever get stuck while using Ruby you’re first stop should be Google,
to some this may sound obvious, but some people still don’t use Google.
Your next stop would be Ruby’s Documentation.
Then I will be showing you forums and mailing lists where you can ask for help
or help others.
Also I will be showing you some blogs by Ruby Developers.

On the tools side, I will be showing you some good Text Editors, and a few
IDEs (or Integrated Development Environments).

Just as a side note, I will be showing many websites today, but don’t worry,
all links are in the description

Lets Get Started!

Out first stop will be Google. Lets say I wanted to learn about Ruby Lambdas
just type in “ruby lamdas” and you get a list of relavant web pages. I’ll
pick the first link, and here is some information on how to use lambdas.

If Google can’t help you, lets look at the official Ruby Documentation.
This is ruby-doc.org. It has some articles and tutorials on Ruby. But what
we are interested in is the part that says “Core API” we are using the
1.8 version of Ruby, so we will visit the 1.8.6 core link
and here is the documentation for Ruby! lets say I wanted to look for lambdas
again, I’ll hit CTRL-F for the browsers find funtion, and type in “lambda” and
here is the information I want, I’ll click the link, and there is the
documentation!

Okay lets say that a Google search and a look through the documentation doesn’t
help you with your problem. What do you do? You ask a person, of course! This
is where the forums come in.

There are two forums that I like, there is ruby-forum.com
And rubyforums.com
both of which you can post on and will hopefully get answers

For general tips and news about Ruby, you may be interested in some blogs about
Ruby. To find some, lets go to ruby-lang.org
click on the community link.
scroll down, and click the “weblogs about ruby” link
and here there are some blogs, and aggregators listed

So hopefully if you have a problem all these resources should be able to help
you. Now we are going to move onto tools. First stop Text Editors.

There are a few good text editors available, so I will just highlight a few.
If any of these look interesting, remember that all links are in the description.
First is Windows only text editor notepad++, the editor I use on Windows
Then is SciTE, a scintilla based editor
Jedit is a popular text editor that is written in Java
Text mate is a very popular text editor for the Macintosh that costs $55
For Linux there are editors like gEdit and Kate which have some of the features
of the editors mentioned above.

Even if you like your featureless plain text editor like notepad, features the
previously mentioned editors have make writing code much easier, and I recommend
you get one.

First we have netbeans, which is my IDE of choice. Even though it was originally
for Java, it works very well with Ruby
Next is Aptana rad rails, an IDE which many people like, but was too buggy on my
computer, it is especially useful if you are using Ruby on Rails
freeRIDE is a popular editor for ruby
Geany is a GTK based editor for Linux that works with many different languages

These are all very good editors, but because you are currently learning I would
just recommend a text editor for now, when you start developing larger projects
an IDE can be very useful.

This brings us to the end of this episode, I hope it helped you.
If you need any help, have questions or comments, leave a comment below or
contact me at tyler@manwithcode.com

Hey! before you go, you may have realized that I am making these videos for free
if they have helped you at all please donate. If you viewing this on Youtube there is a
donation link to the right in the description box. If you are on my site there is
a donation button to the right

Thanks for watching! Bye!

Programming With Ruby Episode 2, Getting Started


Covered in this episode:

  • Installing Ruby
  • What you will need
  • Hello World! program

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to Programming with Ruby Episode 2 – Getting Started. I’m the presenter, as always, Tyler. This is brought to you by manwithcode.com.

This is ruby-lang.org. Go to the downloads section. There are a bunch of links here. If you are on Windows, go to the Ruby One-Click Installer. It is a standard installer, like any other Windows program.

If you are on a Debian variant of Linux (such as Ubuntu). The line:
sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc
will get you what you need

If you are on mac OSX, you can install ruby with mac ports via the command:
port install ruby
alternatively you can go to the ruby OSX one click installer (http://rubyosx.rubyforge.org/), be sure to the installer for version 1.8.7 not 1.9.1

If you are compiling from source, compile 1.8.7 NOT 1.9.1

To get started you will need a text editor, like Notepad. It needs to be plain text editor, we don’t want any of the formatting that programs like Word put on there.

My editor of choice is gEdit, which comes with the GNOME desktop on Linux.

Alternatively you can use an IDE, like Netbeans or Geany.

Open up your text editor, and type in:

puts "Hello World!"

save that to your desktop as hello.rb

There are two ways of running this. If you are on Windows, go to where you saved it and double click on it.

Or you can open up the Command Prompt/Terminal. Change directories to where you saved the files and type in:
ruby hello.rb

Questions or Comments
Leave a comment on this page
or email me at tyler@manwithcode.com

Programming With Ruby Episode 1, Introduction


Covered in this episode:

  • What this series is about
  • A Short History of programming languages
  • What is Ruby (and who makes it)
  • What is Ruby used for
  • Who am I
  • Why am I teaching this

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to Programming with Ruby Episode 1, Introduction

What this series is about
By the end of this series you should be able to effectively use the programming language, Ruby

Short History of Programming Languages
when it all first started out, everything was just 1s and 0s, it was hard to use, and difficult to debug
then it got a little better when assembly came along. You had words like MOV that translated into the corresponding 1s and 0s. compiled by and assembler
then came COLBOL and FORTRAN
then C, which was better, but still sucked
then C++ which brought object orientation to the world
then Python and Ruby. they are both object oriented and very easy to use.

What is Ruby?
A programming language, that supports many different kinds of programming paradigms, and is fully object oriented
Ruby was created by Yuukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto
Matz designed Ruby to be natural, not simple. I think he achieved that.

What is Ruby Used For?
Ruby is used a lot for Web Applications
Computer Administration
Task Automation
Game Programming
And almost anything else
The only thing you might want to stay away from are things that are computationally expensive, like image processing.

Who am I?
I am Tyler J Church
I run the sites Man With Code (manwithcode.com) and ruby game dev (rubygamedev.wordpress.com)

Why am I Teaching This?
It is the tutorial I never had. I was look for something like this when I started learning Ruby. I didn’t want to read a bunch, I wanted to watch videos, but nothing like that existed
I think video is the best way to learn
I want to give back to the community. That brought me Ruby, that helped me learn. Thank You!

Questions or Comments
Leave a comment on this page
or email me at tyler@manwithcode.com

Thanks for reading!