Learning Ruby

So last week, and over the weekend, I've been playing around with Ruby. I'd like to learn a bit about Rails, having been given a very brief overview of rake, and having heard all of the buzz.

Well, I went away with Wife for the weekend (she had this conference/retreat thing to go to), an while I took my laptop, I didn't want to pay extra for a net connection in my hotel room. Yeah, I'm cheap. So I went looking for stuff to download to play/learn with. Alas, it seems that the Rails docs are either non-free PDFs or online in Wiki form, and not having time enough to wget what I needed, I went with plan B.

There are plain-Ruby PDFs out there, most notably Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. The Poignant Guide reads like Douglas Adams having a fever dream, but the Ruby content is good, and seems quite appropriate for beginning programmers, moreso than just beginning Rubyists, but overall is a good read. (At present, I'm on p. 93, picking out the gems (yes, pun intended)).

Time for a Name Change

Well, as posts have been fairly sporadic here since I started this blog, I decided to change my focus a bit, and with that comes a name change. This is now "Dave's Code Blog".

I started it when I was thinking that I'd be diving into Java more deeply than I had done in the past, (about a year and a half ago). After doing primarily Java coding over that time, I've found a couple of things out.

First, Java's a fine language. I mean that without sarcasm. It's fine for what we're doing with it here at work, and as long as you keep it simple, it does its job. As I mentioned a while back, the whole idea of Better, Faster, Lighter is a really good one, and has served us well. Even "lighter" tools like Hibernate were too heavy for what we're doing, and we left them by the wayside.

Second, my heart's not in Java. Not for fun. While it's fine to be employed doing Java work, and while it pays the bills nicely, my heart wants to be using a dynamic language. Like Python, which I know and love, or Ruby, which I started to explore last week, (and will be writing about more in the days to come).

Hence the name change. Ignore the "javadave" in the blog url, this will be where I log the fun things that I find in my coding.

And yes, my heart is still very much in Linux, in case you were wondering. Delightfully enough, Linux has faded into the background for me of late, being something that I just take for granted. No real surprises, no real frustrations, just enjoying the O/S Good Life.