Codecademy

In my last post I mentioned that I had disregarded Ruby for almost no reason at all other than unfamiliarity. Well I have now completed several of the tutorials on Codecademy.com and I can safely say that I was worrying over nothing!

Ruby’s syntax is largely the same as Python. Dictionaries in Python are Hashes in Ruby, the print statement doesn’t put a newline character at the end but the puts command will, etc. The more I worked with Ruby the more it resembled, to me, Python pre-3.0.

Codecademy has made it very easy to learn the basics of Ruby. I’m not very far in to the tutorials, I’ve just hit the methods sections, but already I feel reasonably comfortable using it since I’ve used Python alot recently. To be honest I found most of the tutorials too easy but that’s because I already know several programming languages and am about to finish University (so I’d hope to find them somewhat easy!), even so I believe codecademy is an excellent tool for teaching programming to beginners and professionals alike.

For example, I took a look at the jQuery tutorials since I keep coming across it while working with Twitter Bootstrap but without knowing what any of it does! So I dove in and finished all of the jQuery tutorials, which made me realise just how much I could have been doing with jQuery rather than Python in my rmt project. So now I have yet more future work on rmt. It was suggested to me a while back that I use AJAX to perform certain actions in rmt like retrieving database entries but again I am unfamiliar with this so used a refresh timer in a HTML meta tag. While I am sure AJAX would make my application faster, Codecademy does not cover AJAX in any detail (at least not yet) so I will stick with my working python implementation for the time being. However, the future work section of my dissertation is certainly feeling more fleshed out now!

Codecademy makes it easy to learn and the little mistakes that do exist in the tutorials are already documented in their forums so should hopefully be fixed soon without the user having to do workarounds. Also jQuery is pretty awesome.