Chris Pine wrote:
> James Edward Gray II wrote:
>  > Yes, the Pickaxe is written for experienced programmers,
>  > in my opinion.  It assumes you have a good amount of
>  > knowledge going in, like a fair grasp of object oriented
>  > programing.
> 
> I tried to write my tutorial as sort of a bridge between being a total 
> non-programmer and being ready for the Pickaxe.  It might be too easy 
> for you at first, but on the other hand, I've gotten a lot of positive 
> feedback from programmers and non-programmers alike.  Plus, several 
> people I don't even know recommended it on 43 things; it warmed my 
> heart!  Anyway, here 'tis:
> 
>  http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/
> 
> Basically, it's a tutorial assuming no prior programming knowledge, 
> building one concept at a time, and focussing on learning only one way 
> to do things.  (You can learn the other ways from the Pickaxe, but I've 
> found that new users don't want to know all 7 ways to declare a 
> string.)  All of the examples are live code, with scripted input being 
> fed in as necessary, and the output is captured, formatted, and 
> displayed right there.  So you know the examples really work.  (In fact, 
> if you reload the pages using the random number or current time 
> examples, the output changes each time.  How cool is that?  :)  I even 
> left in some of my mistakes, so you can see real error messages from 
> real mistakes, and you can see how I dealt with them.
> 
> Anyway, I just thought I should mention it.
> 
> Welcome to Ruby!
> 
> Chris
> 
I looked this over and it will really help me out. And I see Chris is in 
Portland too. Thanks so much for posting this!

Barbara