I can't find the study but a comp sci professor gave his incoming first year college class a test of their existing ability, and he found that a single question on his test predicted the students' results in his class with a high degree of accuracy. The question asked the student to predict the results of executing a simple algorithm.
I take this to mean that there is a clear, single biggest hurdle to learning computer programming: learning to simulate the execution of a program in your head: "Learning to think like a computer". With this in mind, I'm not sure I would start most people with Ruby. You might consider playing around with something like Squeak or Alice, designed for teaching programmers to kids (and for just mucking about and having fun). If there's a kid in your life who's 7-15, you could do it together. Playing with something like that until you were able to make reasonably decent games and simulations might in the long run be a great deal more efficient than diving straight into Ruby. Depending on where you're at, of course. If you feel like you can take half a page of PHP and tell me what it does with reasonable facility, then you probably don't need the Alice/Squeak thing (although they're just great fun anyway). Just a thought. Regards, Guyren G Howe Relevant Logic LLC guyren-at-relevantlogic.com ~ http://relevantlogic.com ~ +1 512 784 3178 Ruby/Rails, REALbasic, PHP programming PostgreSQL, MySQL database design and consulting Technical writing and training Read my book, Real OOP with REALbasic: <http://relevantlogic.com/oop-book/about-the-oop-book.php> -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
