On 1/1/06, J. Ryan Sobol <ryansobol / gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds like your at the cusp of a new and exciting thing, so I want
> to give you the best advice I can.
>

Yep, I am about as crispy... er... cuspy as they come right now :)

> Here's the table of contents from the book "Learning To Program" that
> Ed Borasky suggested in a previous post. (http://
> www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/fr_ltp/)  Just by glancing at the
> chapter titles, which of them seem new, familiar, and old news to you
> in terms of your past programming experience?
>
> 1. Getting Started
It seems I am always doing this with learning to program

> 2. Numbers
> 3. Letters
a..b..c..d..e..f..g.. yep I know my numbers and letters, but I am sure
I don't know what they mean in the Ruby Context.

> 4. Variables and Assignment
Creating and assigning values to variables I understand.  I have done
it in my C# scripting for the mud engine I am helping to create.  foo
= bar; etc etc  ... Then I know how to test for (in)equality... foo ==
bar, foo != bar, foo < bar, etc etc

> 5. Mixing It Up
Not sure what they mean here...

> 6. More about Methods
This is probably where I get hung up the most with classes, methods,
instances, instantiation, encapsulation,etc

> 7. Flow Control
IF, ELSE, THEN, WHILE, etc. I understand the concepts, but will have
to learn The Ruby Way to make them work.

> 8. Arrays and Iterators
I touched on arrays in the "Head Start Java" book I was learning from,
but never got very far.  Iterators are like " foo = foo +1"  or " foo
+= foo " right?

> 9. Writing Your Own Methods
Methods that are inside classes?  Again another place I have a very
basic concept of, but haven't done much with.

> 10. There's Nothing New to Learn in Chapter 10
> 11 Reading and Writing, Saving and Loading, Yin and...
File operations.. I did very little of it. I wanted to write a file
parser in PHP for game group for editing files, but didn't understand
the functions very much.  I understand the concepts, but not the
application.

> 12. New Classes of Objects
> 13. Creating New Classes, Changing Existing Ones
Well I have learned to modify templates, variables, etc in previous
applications, but haven't created any new classes or objects on my
own.

> 14. Blocks and Procs
One word... huh? ;)

>
> ~ ryan ~
>

Thanks for taking the time, Ryan, in helping me.  I really appreciate
all the suggestions.

I'm looking at an older version of "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine
that I find in the links that James Britt sent.  But I'm starting to
fall asleep now so I probably won't go very far right yet. heh

Will