Hello, Ruby

This past weekend, I got introduced to Ruby thanks to Girl Develop It Chicago. I didn’t plan on going anywhere near Ruby, especially not anytime soon, but I’ve been trying to make a GDI meetup event for a while now and I just decided to go for this one when it popped up.

I’ve probably said this a dozen times already, but the first language I learned in school was Java.
Prior to that, the experience I had programming was drag and drop in Alice.

Ruby is a pretty simple language compared to Java– at least in my opinion– and I kind of wish that it had been the first one I learned.

One of the first things you learn how to code in any language is how to display the message “Hello World!”
In Java?

public class HelloWorld { public static void main(String[] args) { System.out.println("Hello, World"); } }

But in Ruby?  

puts "Hello World"

See how simple that was? 

Variables, objects, methods, booleans, loops, conditionals, and collections. Oh, and error messages. Plenty of error messages.

I didn’t start taking screenshots until the second half of the class, but you’d be amazed at how fast time flies while you’re coding!

Practicing if statements + user input + math functions.

Practicing loops by asking the user if the loop is a loop. Yep.

For each number between 1 and 1000, print out ones divisible by 7

For each number in the range of 0-500, print the value

So, between now and the next class, we were given some homework to practice what we learned (which I will post when I’ve finished it) plus some reading to prep for next week. I’ll also be going through the course on Codecademy (the Codecademy site was actually built using Ruby!).