Wednesday.

I finished chapter 13 of the Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper. It covers Rails, Sinatra, & Ramaze.  Book is really showing it's age when the Rails version is 2.2.  :(  At least in the example Rails app, it gave me the opportunity to figure and update the old rails way to the terminology of Rails 4.2.  The intro to Sinatra was a nice bonus though.

I am thinking of moving onto Hartl's Rails Tutorial.  I want to move back into Rails learning and I want to be working with a more up-to-date book/tutorial.  I've gotten further than I thought I ever would in the Beginning Ruby book... 13 chapters, over 400 pages of Ruby code learning.  The following couple chapters of the book are on GUI-Based Desktop Application Development, Sockets, Daemons, etc.   I got the basics that I wanted to learn and I want to keep studying those basics in different ways and through building more and more applications and doing coding challenges like codewars.

Of course, I'm keeping up with doing some codewars.com challenges every day.  I am also doing at least 1 dutch lesson everyday.  I need to also learn 5-10 dutch irregular verbs and their past tenses every day too.

How to start your day.

Codewars challenges!

Monday + Tuesday

Working through Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper, just finished chapter 12 (page 345) and built a small bot app.  I like this book better than Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  They cover many of the same topics.  I've also been trying to do a couple of the ruby fundamentals coding katas at codewars every day.

I had another dutch language class on Monday night.  I am trying to study a little Dutch every day.  I need to work on pronunciation.  It's hard for me.  And it kinda sucks being in an expat class.  The instructor will quickly switch to english for explanations and they other 2 students seem to like to use English instead of focusing on trying to speak in Dutch.  I try dutch first to try to explain things in class even if I butcher it (pretty sure that 100% of the time it's spoken terribly).

Weekend progress

Today I worked on a coderbyte challenge, only to then get frustrated when my correct solution would not work in the browser-based ruby environ because it's Ruby 1.8.7!  So I looked online for more coding 'kata' style challenge sites and found codewars.com.  I've done a couple of the easier, fundamental challenges there and like it so far.

Last night, I took a break from coding to go to Rotterdam to see the TR/ST concert.  Was a lot of fun at cool venue that even had Club Mate (unofficial drink of the Berlin startup scene?  I've missed drinking them since I've moved from Berlin to the Netherlands)!  Yumm!

I did some more learn ruby the hard way, through lesson 46 and I think I'm done...  I'm just not into the tutorial that much anymore.  Exercises aren't that interesting to me.  Moving onto other resources.

Saturday

I jumped back into the Beginning Ruby book and did some reading and work.  I created my first gem... a ridiculous small gem with one method that finds all the vowels in a string and puts them into an array.

I found this site coderbyte where there are coding challenges to do using one of several languages.  I started going through the first "easy" exercises in Ruby.  You get points based on how fast you submit a working solution then you can compare to other users' answers.  It's neat to see other people's solutions and how varied they are from each other.  The easy exercises have been harder than I expected... I like the challenge though.  It forces me to go and look up things in Ruby's API or get further clarification on things with stackoverflow.

My spouse is looking to expand his code knowledge from .NET/C# and is looking into learning the MEAN stack, particularly AngularJS.  Pretty cool to be sitting around the house and he's watching tutorials on AngularJS while I'm doing coding challenges on my laptop. :)

Friday's progress.

I did some more exercises in Shaw's Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  I'm on exercise 44: Inheritance vs. Composition.  There was a link in there to read Ruby Style Guide, so I read it too.

I started the Ruby path on Codeschool since I won a 3 month free subscription to it.  I already had done the Try Ruby and Rails for Zombies 1 tutorials.  So, I started back with Rails for Zombies 2 tutorial and I got through segment 4 of 5.  Got a little difficult for me after the third segment.  Hard to go through the exercises when you are more or less watching a video showing some rails techniques, but not actually coding through the app yourself as I thought I would be.  Videos jump around a lot.  Not sure I'm a fan.  Disappointing because I did like Rails for Zombies 1.

Free Codeschool!

Sweet!  I won 3 months of free access to Code School... so I'm going to try their Ruby track and do all the Ruby and Rails courses available.