Getting Jiggy With My Command Prompt Part II, and I Love My Text Editor

I know you're sick of seeing my Command Prompt by now!

I'm finally on Chapter 7 of Chris Pine's Learn to Program. It's beginning to get heavy, with lots of new commands and ideas to keep track of. Amidst all the coding, however, I notice something really neat. My text editor, Komodo Edit, automatically formats. This is handy for when you're trying to keep your code readable. I know a ton of other text editors probably do this also (this shows you how much of a newbie I am, LOL) but I still think it's awesome.

Happy Monday, everyone!!!!

Feminist Hacker Barbie

Forget Kim Kardashian, Computer Engineer Barbie broke the Internet for a few minutes. I won't rehash all the outrage here, for it will have been old news by now.

Rather, I want to give a shout-out and kudos to Kathleen, the maker of Feminist Hacker Barbie, an app where you can rewrite your own version (a better version) of the Computer Engineer Barbie story. You can even check out other user-submitted versions on the site. Just more proof that coding CAN have social impact. And just more proof that now's a good a time as any for women to be entering the computer engineering field.

Eat that, Barbie!!!

I Want To Make Love To This Programming Book

As I mentioned in my first post, I am a complete and utter newbie when it comes to Ruby. Armed with only a couple of free "Basic Ruby" books I downloaded from Amazon, it took me about a century to figure out how to run a program from my command prompt.

But all that's ancient history (yesterday). Since then, I've put aside the Kindle books and picked up Learn to Program by Chris Pine (it finally came in the mail. Uh oh. This post is turning into an unintentional commercial for Amazon. But that's really not what I want). What I really want, is for this post to turn into a commercial for Learn to Program by Chris Pine. This book is unbelievable.

I've only just completed Chapter 2, but I already love it. Using clear, concise language with a bit of humor thrown in, Chris Pine makes me LOVE to learn Ruby. (I'm not kidding! I really love it!) The explanations are short, but thorough. The program examples he gives are long enough to make the concepts stick in your head, but not too long that you become overwhelmed. I wish I had this book at the start of my journey. But maybe if I did, I wouldn't appreciate this book as much. The picture at the top of the page is of my second successful program, calc.rb (a bunch of exercises at the end of Chapter 2). I was even proud of myself after getting an error message, because I knew how to diagnose it!

So if you're completely new to programming and want to learn Ruby in a painless manner, I highly recommend this book!

'Til next update!

Getting Jiggy with my Command Prompt, and Ruby

My first successful Ruby program

I've been a computer user for most of my life. My parents bought the first family computer in 1988, an Apple IIe, when I was five years old. I've played lo-fi computer games with joysticks and cheesy music, saw the dawn of monetized music downloads, and shared pictures of my daily life on Facebook. My employment history is on LinkedIn. In other words, as computer usage has grown, changed, and evolved, I have too. But there was one thing I hadn't done, and that was write a computer program.

No, that isn't entirely true. My Catholic elementary school had a room full of Apple IIes (and C's!) where, once a week, our math teacher would teach us to program using BASIC. I have a fuzzy recall of shading in boxes of graph paper and using code to make pictures of trucks, square-ish flowers, etc. Flash forward about a thousand years later, and I'm trying to teach myself Ruby. It takes me about another thousand years to figure out how to run the "Hello World!" program from my command prompt, but I finally get it. And there is magic. I'm showing everyone this picture of my first successful Ruby program like it's my first-born. And it is.

I'm about 80% done with the free book I got from Amazon kindle that promises to teach me basic Ruby. That doesn't mean I understand 80% of it (LOL) but I'm learning to enjoy the process.

It sure beats pictures of square flowers!