A treat for Ruby newbies
It’s been around for a couple of months now, but the Try Ruby! tutorial is one of the best online tutorials I think I’ve ever seen. Everyone wants to learn Ruby on Rails these days, but learning the basics of Ruby is a somewhat less glamorous task. And, let’s face it, learning the basics of a programming language via a command line doesn’t naturally lend itself to extremes of excitement.
Try Ruby! is the real deal, though. No how-to animations, code listings, half-baked simulations or endless pages of text descriptions. Here, you have a command line interface to play with:
What’s so good about it? I reckon there are (at least) six main things:
- It’s real. Or if it’s not it does an extremely good impression of looking and behaving like a real Ruby command line. And the best way to learn is by doing. As Confucius (allegedly) said “Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand”!
- It supports trial and error learning. You can follow the guidance text, but if you do it wrong you get an error thrown back at you. You can also try out any commands at any time to see what works and what doesn’t. Which brings me to …
- Learner freedom. Unlike an awful lot of e-learning out there, you’re not constrained to a single task on a particular page. At any moment, you can choose to do whatever you want to do. It could be what the text suggests, or it could be trying to pull together and synthesise some different commands that you’ve learnt, or it could be just to see whether you’ve remembered a specific bit of syntax. The key thing is that it’s in the control of the learner.
- Language. It’s got a really nice chatty style. Given the subject, it could be really dull to read, but it’s not. It’s engaging – just the right balance between flippant and formal. And good aide memoires too; who could argue with “Def Leppard = Define Method”!?
- Simplicity. It’s just a command line with some text underneath. You read the text and use the command line. Enough said.
- Looks. It’s not going to win any graphic design awards, but is entirely appropriate for what it is. It’s certainly not fugly.
My only quibble is that there are no global navigation options, so you can sometimes feel a little lost and unable to skip through the text guidance. There are commands for navigation, but these are only shown on the first page, so you have to memorise or print them out right at the start.
Other than that, though – it’s pretty damn good!
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About
I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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