Two great newbie resources made my attention-width this morning:
1) Learn to Program (using Ruby), by Chris Pine. There are tons of books out there that assume you know how to program already and so the title and subject end up being Learn to Program XXXX, but what about Newbies? Chris steps in and decided to use Ruby as the base. His book is due soon as well, which he assures me is even funnier.
2) Rails Weenie. Hey, that’s me! “Sign up and you start off with five points. Offer up points for your questions. The harder the question, the more points you wager.”
Zamplized™ Version of Ruby User Guide Released
Integrated Single Step Trace Facility Debuts
Zamples, Inc., released today an enhanced and updated edition of the Ruby Users Guide. Building on the work of Yukihiro Matsumoto, GOTO Kentaro, Julian Fondren, Mark Slagell and Dave Thomas, this new edtion features live online code examples embedded into the documentation and more examples than the previous edition. All of the code examples work in a web browser without requiring the user to install any software. The Zamplized Ruby Users Guide is freely available for browsing at http://zamples.com/rubyUG/ and can be downloaded in its entirety at no charge according to the terms of the LGPL.
For the first time, the Zamplized Ruby Users Guide takes advantage of a new Zamples capability, a single-step tracing facility. With the trace, the result of evaluating each line of the program can be displayed. Currently Zamples only supports the Ruby language with this facility.
Zamples® patent-pending technology increases the productivity of software developers by providing a collaborative facility in which live code examples can be accessed by developers over the Internet or within intranets using a standard browser-based client. Zamples' products allow software developers to share interactive discussions and examples of excellent code and coding techniques to build skills, enhance productivity, and teach complex interfaces and techniques. Virtually any language and platform API can be supported by Zamples.
The Zamples' web site currently offers free online code examples written in bash, Groovy, Haskell, HTML, Java, Perl, Python and Ruby, as well as for the Google Web Services API, the PayPal API and the Java Servlet API. Developers are invited to add their own examples to the online repository and to write their own clients.