Due to a personal emergency (nothing life-threatening, but it's quite urgent) I won't be able to come to the Nuby Ruby SIG tonight. However, it's still on -- David is going to "manage" things in my absence, and the general idea is that everyone sits down and cuts some code. Anything, really -- just flex your coding muscles and come up with some cool stuff to do. You've learnt enough Ruby now to be dangerous, and you need to put it to significant use in order to *know* how it all works.
Also, starting from next week, *everyone* in the group (myself included) will be giving a 5 minute speil to the group about what they've coded in the past week, what they learnt, and what problems they came up against -- this will hopefully give us some things to work on as a group and learn from. What this means, of course, is that you'll need to actually write some code every week (The First Rule of Nuby Ruby SIG is: The Best Way To Learn To Program Is To Write Programs). It doesn't have to be much -- I can give you large loads of problems to solve if you need help finding something to write, but the point is to write *something*. This means that if you've been slacking a bit and not coding in your own time, the Slack Stops Here. Ideas for tonight and the coming week if you don't have any other ideas to code: Reimplement the basic (or even advanced!) features of the following standard Unix utilities in Ruby (without making a call to the commands themselves!): cat, grep, cp, mv, echo, ln, ls, rm, sleep, touch, head, tail, md5sum, cut, sort, uniq, basename, dirname, printf. Some of those are pretty trivial, some are more advanced -- I'll leave it up to you to decide which is which. Read the manpages for the commands if you don't know what they do. If you're feeling really adventurous, a test suite for each command would be an interesting exercise -- how exactly do you go about testing a command line program? (David and Vini might recall some of our discussions last week on this topic, and can give some pointers there). Have fun tonight, cut lots of code, and I'll see you all next week with reams of code in your hands. - Matt -- "Left to themselves, [marketers] would butt-tag us like polar bears to track our buying habits and bombard our phones and emails and computer screens with ads benefitting them and their clients." --- Tsu Dho Nimh, NANAE _______________________________________________ coders mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/coders
