"James Edward Gray II" <james / grayproductions.net> answered:
> On Apr 13, 2005, at 9:57 AM, Sy wrote:
>
>> Fine.  I like Ruby.  I want to learn Ruby.  How do I work on the
>> problem of motivation?
>
> That's a pretty personal issue and I doubt I have any helpful advice.
>
> When I was younger, ...

I wrote games. Blackjack is good, because you can fairly easily get a 
computer dealer to challenge you at the game.

>> Hack a little every day?  Read a little every day?  What books, what
>> tutorials, what news channels?
>
> Write code.

I agree.

For books, I recommend Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, which is a hilarious 
romp through the Ruby language.

>> Has anyone thought about founding a "Ruby nubie" mailing list or
>> creating nubie-sized short-tutorials, quizzes and challenges?

The Quiz provides a few ideas for places to start writing code, too.

Instead of games and other people's quiz suggestions, you could also rewrite 
something you've already written (i.e. those batch files, or anything you've 
done in C) or, perhaps even better, build something you need. If you can 
identify a repetitive computer-based task you do a lot, if you can imagine 
that some of the repetition could be relieved, figure out how. Ask this list 
when you're stuck - we love to help with this kind of thing.

And here's something you might not hear too much around here: not everyone 
is a programmer. Not everyone even ought to be a programmer. If there other 
skills that are more important to you practically or however else, work on 
those. Nevertheless, programming is a useful skill in a bunch of ways, and 
is quite easy (IMHO) to learn to the stage where it becomes useful.

All the best,
Dave