Recently I posted to ask what’s a good beginner programmer’s book, and I haven’t gotten any immediate response. Now I know that the post hasn’t had time to gestate, but usually from prior posts I do get responses first day.
Ultimately, I think that the reason I’m not getting feedback is because some people are self-taught, and dug through the code and uncovered answers for themselves, some people are class taught, having great instructors that made the information make sense, and not many people are book taught.
If you think of programming as a trade, it does make sense that you would apprentice or take courses to learn. For the art of constructing a program, it would be much harder for me to learn from reading rather than being shown or hand-on with assistance.
However, not everyone has that sort of money or patience. For those people, this is the route that I believe would lead to a successful understanding of the basics of programming: Ruby.
Now, I’m not an expert at Ruby, and in fact I have minimal experience with the language. However, from looking over the resources available on Ruby and how they start from the absolute beginning point, I think this is a great way to get started learning about variables, loops, methods, data structures, classes, and the general overview of what is entailed in programming.
To get started with programming (beginning with Ruby), I suggest the following resource:
http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
This online book starts with the VERY basics (including installing Ruby) and moves on to teach the basics of programming in any language. Each Chapter includes small challenges to help the individual test their knowledge.
If you want to supplement this knowledge, Daniel Carrera from UMD’s math department has an equally good online book available here:
http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/ruby/0.3/index.html
Now, who would I be if I didn’t leave you with at least the code for Hello World! in Ruby?
puts 'Hello World!'
Tell me that’s not simple enough for a beginner!