This post will get into Arrays, which is where you really start seeing some of Ruby's cool programmer-friendly features

Arrays are almost as ubiquitous as strings. You'll be working with them all the time to help store data, everything from the names of all your users to coordinates on a game board. An array is an all-purpose bucket into which you can put pretty much anything.

Here, you'll learn the basics of creating arrays, how to manipulate them in a dozen different ways, and some best practices for working with arrays. Note that we'll be learning even more about how to dig around inside of arrays in a future lesson, so if you're excitedly waiting to better understand #each, #map and others like them, we're almost there! If not... you will be.

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This post will cover strings and all the interesting things you can do with them in Ruby.

Strings are a huge part of web programming and you'll run into them everywhere from variable names to user input to giant gobs of HTML text to handling big dictionary files. They're actually pretty simple at the core but, for being just a jumble of characters, strings have some pretty cool properties in Ruby and you can do a whole lot to manipulate them.

This post should give you an appreciation for the ways you can mess with strings and some of the handy methods that Ruby gives you along the way to make your life easier.

Strings are just made up of individual characters and denoted with quotes. > I confuse Ruby and probably throw an error but > "I do not because I have quotes"

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This post will cover objects, methods and some things about classes in Ruby

"Everything in Ruby is an Object" is something you'll hear rather frequently. "Pretty much everything else is a method" could also be said. The goal here is for you to see the Matrix... that everything in Ruby is an Object, every object has a class, and being a part of that class gives the object lots of cool methods that it can use to ask questions or do things. Being incredibly object-oriented gives Ruby lots of power and makes your life easier.

Think of every "thing" in Ruby as a having more than meets the eye. The number 12 is more than just a number... It's an object and Ruby lets you do all kinds of interesting things to it like adding and multiplying and asking it questions like > 12.class or > 12+3

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This post will be very brief look at some of the basic numbers, operators, and expressions in Ruby

When doing mathematical operations, Ruby expects the result to be the same type as the inputs, so dividing two integers by each other will produce an integer... whether you want to or not:

> 5 / 3
=> 1  

To fix this, you need to make one of the inputs a different data type that can handle decimals, like a floating point number (float):

> 5.0 / 3               # as long as one of them is a float...
=> 1.6666666666666667   # ... the result is a float

Converting between integers and floats is easy -- just use to_i and to_f respectively:

> 5.0234.to_i
=> 5
> 5.to_f
=> 5.0

Because Ruby is so flexible, it lets you do some quirky things like multiplying completely different data types together in a way that you sort of think you should be able to but never expected to actually be able to do:

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The other weekend I had the pleasure of teaching a Rails workshop with Daniel Kehoe of RailsApps. I really wanted a chance to do some teaching and organization and Daniel was testing out the material of his new Rails 4 book. Feedback about the workshop itself was quite good but we also learned a lot about marketing and hustle along the way. In the spirit of that learning, here are some of our victories and mistakes:

Format

We decided to do a full weekend in-person workshop aimed at beginners and technology switchers in the Bay Area. It was two full 9-hour days on Saturday and Sunday with a brief 2 hour installfest on Friday evening. App Academy was generous enough to host for us, so we had a good space to work with and expected to have 20-30 students.

The goal was to install Rails then build and deploy a sample app by the end of the weekend and to help the students understand why they took the steps they did. The app favored APIs like Google Drive instead of using ActiveRecord on the back end so we could actually cover all the material in the time allotted.

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The Old

Building modernwanderlust.com (my old blog site) was a fantastic starter project to break into web development. I basically followed a tutorial on Udemy that used an AMP (Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack and hacked, smashed and sweated my way to a working prototype over about a month during the summer of 2012.

And ever since it launched, I've been terrified to change anything. Think about the first thing you ever built... how robust and modular was your code? Yeah, this is probably worse. Couple that with the fact that all my focus has gone into learning Ruby and Rails (NOT PHP), and you can understand why I've had this thing in my sites for a major overhaul. Given my new Rails wizardry, it couldn't take more than 4 hours on a weekend, right?

Famous last words for a side project, of course... It's been several weekends spaced out over a couple months :)

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It's been some time since I last got the chance to put down some words here and it's not for lack of anything to say. I've been incredibly busy over the past few months putting together what has been a devilishly interesting and intense project. I left my position at App Academy in May to do so full time.

The Odin Project is an attempt to put my efforts where my mouth is... a chance to try and make a meaningful impact in online education. The goal of the project is to educate developers from absolute beginner to employable using the same project-based and pair-oriented methodology that proved so effective in my own education. It is based around an open-source curriculum that leverages as much existing content as possible to get from A to B.

Building out the curriculum and the tools to help students pair together has been a herculean task so far but traction is picking up and I'm running a regular class based on what I've put together. It's incredibly exciting to see the project so far help real people take a meaningful step forward in their own education. I'm also beginning to get interest from other developers in the community, which has opened up some great dialogues around the project.

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Taking an online course can be a pretty lonely and thankless task. The learning approach is often ported right from university and emphasizes individualized learning and accountability. Many of the free online courses have students sign honor code agreements which state that all their work is completely their own or they are otherwise ineligible for end-of-course certifications. It's no wonder that so many students drop out before the finish. Motivation is hard to come by with no one cheering you on and the approach barely follows how people work in the real world anyway.

The workplace demands a more significant level of collaboration; very few projects are done in isolation. Programming circles, in particular, have successfully used a project-based pairing methodology for many years. The idea is that when you put two programmers at one computer (with two mice, monitors, and keyboards), you reap benefits in excess of the sum of their combined hours. Typically, one programmer is the "driver" and writes the code while the other "navigator" reviews the code and guides the path forward. The result in a production environment is a more coherent, efficient and bug-free code base.

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The education system is pretty messed up. I don't think many people will argue with that. Tuition at my alma mater -- Penn -- rose this year to $39,088, not including the $12,368 for room and board (1). I'll admit that my eyes popped when I looked that up. Compare that with another stat, that only 60% of students were able to find full-time employment after graduating (2), which is *above average*. How the holy hell is this a legitimate situation? Of course, the value of a well-rounded liberal arts education goes well beyond the boundaries of such a narrow idea as getting paid enough to live and eat and...

A full on, 4-year liberal arts education is like a big fatty steak. It costs a lot, it tastes great, and it's of questionable nutritional value. And not everyone should be eating it. Why are we still telling people to pay over $200k for something with only a 60% probability of resulting in a job? Why do you so often hear "I only learned 10% of what I used on the job in school"? Some people will always eat steak but for the rest, we need a fat free education.

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*Note: It's been a long time since I wrote this and it's been a surprisingly popular post. Since then, I've founded the Viking Code School, an online software engineering program that takes exceptional aspiring developers and makes them job-ready. Our mission is meant to bring this level of education to people who cannot uproot their lives to attend an in-person program and I encourage you to check it out if this path interests you.*

I recently attended the inaugural Ruby on Rails bootcamp offered by App Academy and it was a hell of an experience. It's an undertaking that I highly recommend but one which takes a serious level of maturity and commitment to do right. Given that hundreds of other students will soon walk a similar path, I've put together the following recommendations to help you get the most out of your bootcamp experience. You may not be headed to the same program but I bet you'll find some of this useful to you anyway.

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