Ruby Syllabus 2015 Notes

The current experience

What are the typical motivations for learning ruby at codebar?

• Started with Rails, Code Academy etc and wanted to get a grounding in the fundamentals of ruby
• Working with technology but in a non-programming role (eg project management, consultancy), and wanting to get more involved with the code
• Working on General Assembly/Makers projects and needing support

Where do people get stuck?

(some of which will be things we can avoid as you can learn them later once motivation and momentum is strong, some of which are important parts of learning)

• Finding characters such as #, {, } and others on non-English keyboard layouts

• Navigating between directory on a computer in explorer/finder and understanding that directory is also available via a Terminal.app/cmd window

• Understanding gets, blocking and inputting text into the terminal - for the coach, having to explain IO is tough.

• Understanding the difference between public, private and protected - especially protected

• How to test a CLI (automation not encouraged by the tutorial, but I have had this as a follow up question)

• Ruby 1 ** Not a codebar tutorial - ruby in 100 minutes. Very syntax heavy, without practical examples ** Requires coach to make a call on which bits are important and which bits are not. E.g.: *** symbols not easy to explain, and not well explained there. Is it important that a beginner does symbols on their first day? *** passing a block into a function; this is tough to explain and the examples (gsub) aren't great

How well do tutorials as a format work?

• No validation of understanding - e.g. people move on to one tutorial once they've finished it, rather than assessing whether they understand it
• Tendency to use copy/paste, rather than type, can be hard to prevent and a major barrier to learning. The coach needs to insist.