Is there a Perl equivalent to the ruby-koans project?
When I was starting to learn ruby a few months ago I stumbled across ruby-koans and it was a huge help for learning the basics of the language.
I now need to poke at some Perl code, and while I've hacked together a few Perl scripts in the past I've never really learned the language, and every time I have to refer back to older scripts I wrote for even simple things. I have a feeling that something like koans would make it much easier for me to learn and retain knowledge of Perl.
Does anything like that exist?
Two possible options in absence of 100% identical alternative:
A mid-point between perldoc and ruby koans is O'Reilly's Perl Cookbook.
It offers working "how to solve this particular task" examples.
As a DIY perl koan, how about perusing "perl" tag on StackOverflow and trying to answer the questions (without peeking at answers)? Not 100% the same but a great way to learn by doing.
One great resource that I use to quickly move between languages is RosettaCode. Its not tutorials, but a wide assortment of simple programming tasks done in many languages. I find that if I know one or two languages on the page, using them, I can usually figure out how an unfamiliar language on the page works. The Ruby, Python, and Perl sections are even close alphabetically, making jumping back and forth easy.
Perl happens to come with great documentation that is more than just a list of API functions, parameters and return types.
Those tutorials include a lot of code samples that show what to do and what not to do.
In my experience, one needs to read ALL of the bundled documentation at least once before seeking other sources of wisdom.
I don't know of anything exactly like the koans.
The standard docs have lots of example code--especially the tutorial and cookbook style articles.
Some other resources:
Perl Advent Calendar
The Perl Cookbook
PLEAC - Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook
Here is a repo on GitHub that provides a good number of koans:
https://github.com/forcedotcom/PerlKoans
Try reading "Learning Perl" (not earlier than 4th edition) or "Beginning Perl". Both has exercises.
Still in its infancy but this is a start.
https://github.com/maio/perl-Koans
I just recently came across the Perltuts project. It has a similar feel to Codecademy.
Related
Would Reek be useful in training a ruby noob in good practices or does it require an experienced ruby eye to use and interpret?
I have mumble-muble years or programing experience but mostly in C variants. I've used Ruby lightly for the last few years as a utility scripting language but my ruby code is obviously largely just transliterated C. Now I wish to use it as a serious tool and I want to learn the "ruby way."
I've planned to use TDD/BDD from the start to provide the necessary training feedback and it looks like perhaps Reek might be useful in providing feedback about non-standard forms and uses. However, by long experience, I know that such tools can be two-edged swords that require prior experience to use and in hands of novice cause more problems than they solve.
Does anyone have experience in using reek (or a similar tool) in this way?
If it matters, I will be focusing initially on writing stand-alone applications for MacOS X i.e. no rails, server-stuff, etc.
No, Reek is not intended to be a Ruby style checker. If you want such a thing, I'd suggest Roodi -- or, better yet, pairing with someone who can show you good Ruby style.
I wrote Reek as a little research project, and frankly it isn't as useful as simpler tools such as flay, flog and rcov. Learn to be a better coder by eliminating duplication and complexity, and by TDDing your code.
Reek warns about possible design issues (and some more trivial things), but it does not help you write idiomatic Ruby. Frankly, I think reading the features is just as valuable as actually running reek.
My advice for someone coming from C-like languages: get the for-loop out of your system. Pretend it does not exist. That will force you into more rubyish idiom.
Have a look at RuboCop
It detects many small things, and can even auto-correct some of them. If you use Git, you can stash your changes before you run RuboCop, so you can see the corrections using git diff.
I had to work to force myself into the TDD mindset and I am finding the toolkit provided by the metrical gem (a wrapper for metric_fu) pretty helpful. In fact I'd recommend going through all of the Railscasts on testing - it's not a huge time sink and I found it valuable.
The recent Railscast on how he does testing is a great way to set things up, then I went back and went through the other tutorials on Request Specs, Capybara, Metrical etc.
I suppose this is two very closely related questions:
Everyone says to start with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, and I can't stand that book; what's another good starting point for an experienced programmer that has a more serious tone?
If I'm not the sort of person who appreciates _why, should I skip Ruby because the community will not be to my taste?
I'm currently rolling through Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide. So far I think the concepts are well-defined by the authors, and the examples provided help clarify any misunderstandings. The book is available for free online or you can order a copy:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
Update: More current version of book (Thanks bgporter)
http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby3/programming-ruby-1-9
The only problem with the online version is that it is a little outdated. I don't know Ruby that well yet so I can't say how much of the book is still valid in all cases, but the examples have worked for me so far when I run them. Note that the book available for purchase is up to date. It's hard to beat free, so be sure to check this guide out.
That being said, I don't think you should skip out on Ruby just yet. I've had a blast learning the language so far, and I'm looking forward to doing some full-fledged web development with Rails soon. At the very least give the language a chance; I think you'll find it a joy to work with.
I bought a lot of books learning ruby, the Well Grounded Rubyist was hands down the best.
And while we aren't really a community of _whys, we are a community of people who appreciate creativity and cleverness in code. If you are the sort of person who thinks there should only be one way to do something, and that way should be the clearest and most straight forward possible, python is probably for you. If you are the person who likes to push the language as far as it will go to create interesting and clever APIs, ruby is probably for you.
The Ruby Programming Language.
Programming Ruby would be my choice. It's also known as the Pickaxe book because of the cover:
It's a great introduction to Ruby. Why they still have the huge API reference in it in this day and age escapes me, though. It makes it thick as a brick, which is its only fault.
You can also find it online, although I think it's the first edition, which is well dated: http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/. The third edition is the one in print now, it was updated just months ago and covers Ruby 1.9.2, which is the latest version of Ruby at this time.
I don't particularly like _why either. He created some great libraries, but I can't stand the Poignant guide, nor any of the talks he made. You don't have to like him, or be like him to belong in the Ruby community.
Ruby Koans are great for learning those small things that make Ruby unique.
It's basically set of excercises that show you how things work. Each excercise is in form of a failing test, and you have to make sure it passes. And they're fun! :)
If you're going to do them all, I also suggest enabling autotest, so you won't have to run them manualy. This article explains how.
Not everyone says start with Why's book, for instance, me.
Here's a quick list of my on-disk Ruby books and references. You can search for their individual titles on the interwebs. Some are commercial, and some are free. I linked the ones that are part of an app's documentation that I saved as PDFs so I'd have them on my laptop.
Agile Web Development with Rails
Programming Ruby
Ruby Best Practices
Sequel cheatsheet
Sinatra Book
The Ruby Cookbook
The Ruby Programming Language
The Ruby Way
The Well Grounded Rubyist
Why's book is worthy, but reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson trying to write a programming book, complete with Ralph Steadman drawings, which really disturbs me.
Also, don't overlook using ri, which is the on-disk reference to Ruby's libraries and gems. Also, the core library and standard library docs are really useful.
I was in your position this summer. Why was not for me, but I did find an excellent online resource: http://railstutorial.org/. It is actually for learning Ruby on Rails, but you can use it to learn Ruby as well. I'm not very experienced but I believe you can be part of the Ruby community without appreciating Why :-).
http://railsforzombies.org/ is a nice one , although it is not a book
Chris Pine's Learn to Program It's very straightforward. I started learning right away. It was very encouraging.
My colleague has written an excellent post summarizing starting points, books to read and paths to follow when learning ruby at http://www.jasimabasheer.com/posts/meta_introduction_to_ruby.html
I'd recommend taking a look at it, it has a wealth of information.
To add more info to the answers above, not really a book to learn ruby but a some companion resources for the learning process:
Ruby Language Quick Ref
Essential Ruby Refcard
I am required to automate software tests for my job and I currently use groovy to do this. However, I am thinking about adding Ruby to my repertoire. Mainly because I can see myself working on a rails project in the future.
How long do you think it would take to become relatively proficient at scripting with Ruby? I am talking mainly navigating around a DOM with webdriver/webrat and programatically doing text/file changing work.
One weekend of intense dedication.
Seriously, it's a matter of how much time you have got on your hands and what's your previous experience. If you've dabbled in Perl or Python, you'll probably have an easier time picking up Ruby than if you had just used Java before.
Depends on how much experience you have with other programming languages. You should be able to learn the basic ruby syntax in an afternoon. And then work on learning the testing libraries might take another couple of days of playing around with them. You certainly wont be a ruby expert but you should be able to hack together some test scripts pretty quickly.
You could start here -
Ruby in Twenty Minutes
Then maybe go here -
17 Videos Covering Basic Ruby Techiques
If you have programming experience I would say 2 weeks of intense focus on ruby will get you 99% of way....the major features of ruby that distinguish it from other scripting languages are its intrinsic use of iterators (you almost never code for or while loops) and associated code blocks. Once you become familar with these the rest of it falls into place.
A minute to learn ... a lifetime to master.
With no previous technical experience I started learning ruby, html, css etc at the same time and it took me 2 years before I could get something up and know what was actually going on. Rails of course makes all of this faster and if you already know other programming languages you could tackle the basics and be functional in 6 months.
Ruby has Nokogiri, which is an excellent HTML/XML parser. It supports both CSS and XPath accessors, making it very easy to navigate through a parsed HTML file's DOM.
Building on top of Nokogiri is Mechanize, which was based on Perl's WWW::Mechanize. It makes it easy to navigate through a website's pages, extracting fields, filling out forms and submitting them, tracking cookies and sessions, etc. Because Mechanize is built on top of Nokogiri, you can get at the underlying DOM and use the same CSS and XPath accessors.
Ruby has several different testing environments. Test::Unit comes with Ruby and is easy to use. There's also Autotest, RSpec, Shoulda and Cucumber to name a couple others. Autotest is nice because it will watch your directory and run tests as you modify the files, so you're instantly aware if you break something.
I came to Ruby from a Perl and Java background, with C/C++ before those. To me, Ruby is like a child of Java and Perl because it has some similarities to both, but at the same time the things that were annoying with both those languages are nicely sidestepped on Ruby. It's almost as if Ruby was the logical growth, or next generation, of the other two. I think that's partly the benefit of hindsight, and of Matz' intention to make Ruby be a language for programmers, not machines.
I tried learning Rails in parallel with Ruby, but caught Rails as it changed from v1 to v2. All the books were out of date and wrong, most websites were wrong, and finding good information was tough. Eventually I realized the confusion was in the documentation and backed away from Rails for six months and concentrated on Ruby, using it daily at work. I began using it almost exclusively because I was able to more succinctly express ideas in it than I could in Perl. I could write more tersely in Perl, but it wasn't as readable, which is important to me because that helps make code maintainable.
Now, a few years later, I prefer Ruby over any language I've ever used. I still program in Perl but evangelize Ruby at work, and use it any time I need to write something that touches a database, because of Sequel, or to write web front ends to the databases using Rails, Sinatra or Padrino, combined with HAML.
Depends, are you using any other scripting languages? Ruby is pretty straight-forward to some people. I found it easy to remember most of the common method names. If you've worked with other languages to any decent extent then it shouldn't be more than a week to be deeply enjoying the language. If it's your first time programming, you need to get a good solid grip on Object Oriented Programming to truly appreciate it.
I'm sitting here writing a function that I'm positive has been written before, somewhere on earth. It's just too common to have not been attempted, and I'm wondering why I can't just go to a website and search for a function that I can then copy and paste into my project in 2 seconds, instead of wasting my day reinventing the wheel.
Sure there are certain libraries you can use, but where do you find these libraries and when they are absent, is there a site like I'm describing?
Possibly a wiki of some type that contains free code that anybody can edit and improve?
Edit: I can code things fine, I just don't know HOW to do them. So for example, right now, I'm trying to localize a robot/car/point in space. I KNOW there is a way to do it, just based off of range and distance. Triangulation and Trilateration. How to code that is a different story. A site that could have psuedo code, step by step how to do that would be ridiculously helpful. It would also ensure the optimal solution since everybody can edit it. I'm also writing in Matlab, which I hate because it's quirky, adding to my desire for creating a website like I describe.
StackOverflow.com. No, I'm not joking.
At its best, people come here saying "hasn't some library done X already", and very often the Collective Wisdom answers "yes". But the biggest obstacle is lack of a description language: even here, a big problem for many posters is describing the problem clearly enough for others to recognize it as something they've seen before.
And if people can't understand what you're trying to do, no search engine will.
Firstly, two caveats:
Copy and pasting code you don't understand is a bad idea. Make sure you understand exactly what the code does before you use it.
Make sure you respect the license of the code you are copying. This is important!
Those caveats aside, it's often language dependent. Languages with an open development ethos (not just an open source implementation, think Python as compared to Java) tend to have official archives of open source libraries. For example:
Perl (which probably started this trend) has CPAN
Python has PyPI and Python Cookbook
PHP has PEAR
C++ has boost
Ruby has gems
R has CRAN.
Haskell has Hoogle and Hackage
Furthermore, don't forget to look in your languages standard library. Some modern languages have massive standard libraries, which have often contained the functionality I am looking for:
Java has its API documentation
C# and VB.NET have the massive MSDN
Non-openly developed languages often have non-official community archives. For example:
C# tends to have a lot of code at CodePlex and CodeProject
MATLAB has the Matlab Central File Exchange
A third category of sites are language agnostic. They are often best search through POG (plain old-fashioned Google). For example:
Stack Overflow
SourceForge
The confusingly language agnostic Java2s
Planet source code
Github
Finally, a fourth category of sites that I find increasingly useful are source-code search engines:
Google Codesearch
Koders
You may also be able to find useful source code, or at least get help writing something, through various pastebins.
Pastebin is language-agnostic
HPaste is mostly Haskell, but has a little in other languages.
Often, at the end of the day it is easiest just to google it, though.
There is a wiki that contains free code that anybody can edit and improve:
Rosetta Code.
As a means of an overview there is the "Solutions by Programming Task" page.
From the former page:
"Rosetta Code is a programming chrestomathy site. The
idea is to present solutions to the same task in as
many different languages as possible, to demonstrate
how languages are similar and different, and to aid a
person with a grounding in one approach to a problem
in learning another."
Cutting and pasting code you find on the Internet into production code would be like chewing gum found in the street. - Mike Johnson
With that in mind, try sites that host opensource projects like GitHub, CodePlex, code.google.com, etc.
I'm not sure this question is language agnostic, but I use GitHub this way ;) Other languages may have places where this is possible.
Safari Bookshelf from O'Reilly has many, many books that contain many implementations from which to choose.
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/
I was a subscriber for a few years before coming to my current job, where we have a corporate account! It's one of the best perks, and one of the best resources I have available. I haven't bought a computer book in years.
Aside from sites like this (Stack Overflow) I don't think there's many, maybe CodePlex, but I almost marked you -1 for assuming that code found on the Internet is yours to copy.
I'd suggest reading about software licencing, I hope you'd at least comment where you got it from.
I am intermediate in java but as one of the company requirements they are looking for JAVA+RUBY programming language..
Can anybody help how to get started with Ruby I need to get it done in next one month so that I can crack the interview of the company...
I wanna know how does Ruby work like compiler, is it platform independent or how does byte code generated..
I must be able to write the small level programs in Ruby..
Like in java First I need to download JDK den getting started with programs..
How about Ruby what all I need to install in my computer..
Thanks..
To Ruby From Java
To Ruby From Other Languages
Download Ruby
The Pickaxe book
Why's guide
Kind of surprised no one has mentioned JRuby yet.
One of its strengths is the ability to natively call Java classes, so you can use a lot of the frameworks from Java that you're already familiar with.
Downloading the Ruby Koans is another great way to learn
http://github.com/edgecase/ruby_koans
Pragrog books are always good:
http://pragprog.com/titles/fr_j2r/from-java-to-ruby
Start here:
http://tryruby.org/
Once you do the 15 minute walk-through, go here:
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
To Ruby from Java:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/ruby-from-other-languages/to-ruby-from-java/
That is the official site for Ruby and will be able to point you to language downloads and other resources.
How about the Ruby language web site: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
Also, I would advise you not to try and come across as a ruby expert in the interview after only playing with it for a month. It's better to err on the side of honesty, because a good interviewer will be able to tell when you are faking it... or worse, it will show when you start working.
Ruby is a cool language... have fun!