Monday Morning Update #1

The first week of my programming courses on Coursera was mixed. I like the Python class, but I'm really skeptical about the Web Application Architecture Class. It's taught at the University of New Mexico, and it has a community college feel to it. The videos are just good enough to not be funny and the professor doesn't seem very interesting at this point...but we'll see how it goes.

The Python class, on the other hand, seems like it's going to be awesome. It's taught at Rice and our projects are making games...so that's going to be plenty awesome. The final project is an Asteroids clone. There are five professors that teach the class, I get the impression that most people who work with Python are pretty fun and have a sense of humor.  Exhibit A: the history of the name "Python." The teachers are not that funny, but they're trying, and keeping the class interesting. Neither of the classes are that demanding, yet. I did the first week's work for both classes on Monday.

On the Rails front, I had to dump the lynda tutorial. For starters, the guy teaching it was moving at 900 mph; that I could tolerate, but the straw that broke the camel's back on that tutorial was the fact that he kept changing things in the application that he wasn't recording or explaining and I got tired of having to do detective work to keep up with the lessons.

I have since moved on to this tutorial, which is awesome...so far. A part of me wishes that I had just gone ahead and done this tutorial, first, but I may be discounting how much what I learned doing the lynda tutorial puts me ahead of the game in this one. This new tutorial is more like a guide on a journey to learning to develop. Today, I got git all set up on my system and that was pretty cool. So in short, I've done another Ruby tutorial and I've been reading another book...one about git...along with the web design book that I started last week. So...right now, I'm still in the setting everything up phase.

...peep it:

So now, I'm also working on my unix skills, as well. I am having fun, though. I really wouldn't want to be doing anything else with my time, right now. I'm looking forward to this weeks classes, and the next chapters and lessons in my books and tutorials.  

In my spare time, I'm working on my Spanish and Hindi for 30 minutes a day each and taking Buddhism and Modern Psychology. Also, every week, or so, I take a day or two off and do absolutely nothing, but watch TV and maybe have a few beers. The bad/awesome news is my sleep schedule is completely flipped. I go to sleep between 7:00AM and noon everyday. 

WHY IS INSTALLING THE MySQL GEM SO HARD??? [the Struggle is Real]

LOL...seriously, though. I don't think people really use Ruby on Rails and everyone is lying to me. I have been trying to get it to work all day. I actually got it to work once...and then it stopped working, again. I'm hoping that there is someone at hypepotamus that can help me with it tomorrow.

In the mean time, I've started reading another book and went back to learning python, too. It was driving me crazy not working with python for some reason, so I re-started the Code Academy lessons. I got a new book from my cousin, it's called 7 Languages in 7 Weeks; it's pretty good. I did the first day yesterday and I'm about half way through day 2, now. I think the jumping around between books and working on python, as well, will be good for me. I'm getting really antsy with ruby and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how it works. From here on out, it's probably going to be more about learning about the methods and applying what I know.

The Coding Complete book is starting to frustrate me a little bit, to be honest. It's talking about some things that I don't really understand. A lot of it is over my head, so I'm taking it in pieces. The pickaxe book is good because it keeps me learning ruby and I need it to do the assignments in the 7 Languages in 7 weeks book: the first language is ruby. My cousin also sent me Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language, but I think that I'm going to hold off on starting that one, at least until I finish the Code Academy exercises.

I guess what I'm really struggling with most right now is understanding how everything fits together. I'm not completely lost, though. I know HTML, and I've worked with JavaScript and JQuery, but I don't really understand how Rails fits in. I understand a little bit, but it's fuzzy for me. The thing is, that no matter how frustrated or stumped I get, I realize that as long as keep working on it, it gets better.

@hypepotamus

I haven't been making any entries for the past few days, mostly because of extracurricular activities. I'm at hypepotamus, now, working on stuff. It's been a good day. The weather here is nice, too.

The meet up that I went to on Thursday was more of a social...son, I was a little disappoint. Not really, it wasn't the one where they help people set up Rails, but I'm glad that I went. I learned a lot of stuff, one of them being that I'm further ahead than I thought I was. I also got a lot of really good advice on my learning process.

protip: if someone lives in Alpharetta, Marietta, Lawrenceville, or any other area that is outside of the 285 perimeter, they DO NOT live in Atlanta, and you should tell them to stop telling people that. 

The meet up on Sunday, that I wanted to go to, was actually not in Atlanta, which bothers me a little but :). Too many people from the outskirts of Atlanta like to tell people that they live in Atlanta and that the areas around where they live are called "Atlanta." As a result, they set up meet ups called "Atlanta Ruby Users Group" that aren't actually in Atlanta [okay, maybe that one was in Atlanta, but just barely]. So yeah...I missed that particular meet up.

I have been working on my coding, though. I've finished the code academy stuff and started reading the the pickaxe book. I think this one is better...it could be because I've know more now and therefore I understand the topics, but I doubt it. I don't regret reading The Book of Ruby, first, though. Before I started reading this I was planning on re-reading TBoR, reading this one is a better idea. I also found a list of books to read, so I won't be starving for reading material any time soon.

The good news is that the more time that I spend learning, the more I understand and am comfortable with. That isn't anything groundbreaking or anything, but sometimes when you get bogged down into learning something new and challenging, you forget that eventually it's going to click and it's going to be awesome.

...finally.

Well, I finally finished TBoR. I had a few issues...that's why it's been a few days since my last entry. Thursday, night/morning, when I usually do these, my Windows Operating system went into what I thought was an infinite loop of updating my computer. After that, the whole House of Cards thing happened, so OBVIOUSLY, I had to watch the whole season of that.


In between the distractions, though, I finally got it done:

In this book I've covered a lot of ground—from “hello world” to dynamic programming. You've explored most of the important and powerful features of the Ruby language. The rest is up to you. This is where the adventure really begins. - The Book of Ruby

The last chapter, Dynamic Programming, wasn't exactly as exciting as I thought that it would be, but now I'm excited about actually building stuff using Ruby. I've actually already started on something that I can use to practice. I also plan on doing the challenges at <code_eval> and, maybe, redoing the exercises at Code Academy.

It seems like so much longer than 2 weeks since I started that book, and now it's over and the real learning can begin. Even though I didn't work on my coding as much as normal over the past few days, I think that the break was good.

I'm really looking forward to the upcoming week, I found another meet-up in Atlanta called Nerd Club in Grant Park, on Thursday, so I'll most likely be going to that.  As long as I take care of business this week, I should have an awesome weekend coming up, seeing as I've been invited to parties on both Friday and Saturday. There is a strong possibility that my entry on Friday night may get interesting, so I'm going to preemptively go ahead and advise you not to read that one now, if it happens.

 

About that Snowstorm...

I think it's finally getting here.  I may have been overly ambitious thinking that I would complete TBoR, today, but I'm still awake.  At least I know that I'll be done tomorrow.

I finished that chapter about Ruby on Rails; it's strange, to me, that I remember HTML, for some reason.  I guess that I shouldn't be that surprised. I was planning on doing a refresher when I start focusing on Rails.  I'm still going to do it. Everything is definitely making more sense now, and after tomorrow, I will be working more on an actual project and spending less of my time on such an academic approach to learning this particular language.

My study of Ruby has once again reinforced the idea that anything can be learned, if you just devote enough time to it. My understanding of not only programming, but computer science in general is so much broader now than it was when I began this pursuit.  Granted, I've been taking online courses and doing a lot of reading, but I was so lost when I began.  I'm still lost now, but at least I know what I need to learn.

I organized my web page favorites in my browser and made a folder specifically for learning code. Once I finished this book tomorrow, I have plenty of great resources to learn from. Most of the sites that I've found have been from reddit. I am subscribed to /r/ruby. /r/programming, and  /r/learnprogramming, although I have only been lurking up to this point.  I'm going to do as much as possible on my own before I start getting help from other people, solely because I don't want to end up talking to someone about this and have them go into a 2 hour lecture on things that I have no idea about. I think that reading TBoR was a strong first step in that regard.  Now that I have an overview, I think that I will be more prepared to get help when I start doing more practice and development.

Anyway, that's today's take on this process. On a side note, I scored 120 on Flappy Bird, today...so there's that.

"Snowstorm"

They cancelled the two meet-ups that I was going to this week due to an impending snowstorm that has yet to materialize.  It was supposed to start snowing already, but apparently, that's been cancelled, as well.

I'm reading Chapter 19, now, in TBoR, and it's becoming apparent that I just need to push through and finish this book, so I can start back from the beginning of Ruby. I plan to finish this book by tomorrow, so it's pretty much all I'm going to be doing for the rest of the night. Learning new things is always the boring part of anything, mostly. It's the applying the part that becomes both fun a frustrating.

At this point in my "learning" the Rails isn't working as advertised and this is really what I'm having a problem with. I was trying to work along with the book, but this version of TBoR was written for versions of both Ruby and RoR, which is making the whole process...challenging.  I'm one of those A type personalities that likes to understand completely what I'm doing at all times so the urge to start over is driving me to complete this book ASAP. The good thing is that I have a much better understanding of what I need to learn.

Getting there...

I spent the lion's share of my day, yesterday, watching this: The Story of Science...I regret nothing.

I did a little bit of reading, though, and I caught up today.  So basically, what I'm trying to say is that I'm on Chapter 19 of The Book of Ruby. I also feeling better about where I am. To celebrate, I started building my first app/program. I can't do much, but I think this is going to be the first step of my learning where my actual programming ability starts growing.

I haven't started spending a lot of time coding, yet, because I told myself that I need to finish reading the book before I dive in a start spending too much time. The reason that I'm doing this is because, not only will it give me incentive to finish the last two chapters, but when I go back through the book looking for answers, I will have a comprehensive idea of what's in that book and what I need to look elsewhere for. Plus the next two chapters are about Rails and Dynamic Programming, which both sound dope.

I've experimented with Rails a little bit, but I can't get it to work properly so once I've finished reading this book, I can dive into that a little more, as well. Anyway, I'm excited again about learning this stuff. Sometimes, you just have to push through the boring stuff until you get to the other side. Generally, when you work hard on something and put in the effort, it's worth it.  Especially, when it's something that you enjoy doing.  I'm pretty sure that nothing exists in life that is all fun; everything in life has an aspect that sucks no matter how awesome it is.  If you don't believe me go record a song, or play a sport, or start a business...or take a trip.

...still

Still working on my Ruby skills. I read something motivating today on reddit: If you feel overwhelmed! KEEP AT IT! So...I'm keeping at it.

I finished chapter 16 in The Book of Ruby. That chapter made a lot more sense, to me. I have 4 more chapters, after that, I'm going to reread it slowly whilst doing other Ruby shit. I've also finished my first set of lynda.com videos. The new plan is to get an overview and then go over the materials again until I understand. I'm also only going to study Ruby until at least the end of April. I think that I need to get really strong in one language, before I start trying to learn the others...irregardless of what my cousin says about me being able to do Ruby and Python at the same time.  However, I will take his advice and focus on Python, next.

It's a good thing that I've always enjoyed computers and programming.  I'm really learning a shitload and for me, this journey is more about being able to make a living doing something I like more than anything. I was a marketing consultant and I really didn't like that job for several reasons including: corporate processes, lack of respect for marketing, and the lack of a culture that was anything approaching a meritocracy.

Don't get me wrong: I love marketing, but if I had the choice to go back to school, knowing what I know now, I would have studied either computer science or engineering and then got an MBA.  But that's water under the bridge and I did study marketing because it taught an important field, that I'm interested in...I just really want to be in tech and I really enjoy programming and solving problems.

To be honest, I'm a couple of days behind where I thought that I would be in The Book of Ruby, but I'm not disappointed.  I'm taking all of these online classes, but I realized today that completing these classes with a good grade is not the goal. The goal is to learn programming and class performance means nothing: I have my degree already and getting a job in this field, at this point, will be based on what I can do and not showing potential employers that I can finish school.

On to Chapter 16: Regular Expressions

So I powered through the Marshal chapter with the full acceptance that I don't really understand this shit.  I've been doing a million things to get the momentum to finish that chapter.

One of those things was the Rails tutorial, that I was talking about yesterday. Everything was going swimmingly until I got to the part about installing Rails.  I was pretty sure that all of the gems and "plug-ins," for lack of betters word and understandings, like Rails and Git were already bundled and loaded into my system with the original Ruby installation.  At this point, I'm pretty sure that I was right, but the command "subl" is not working for some reason. Originally, I thought that it was because I was using Aptana to try the first exercise, so after a little bit of trying to figure it out, a little bit of reading "Infinte Jest," and a little but of attending to my free online courses; I decided to just try it through the PowerShell, which, btw, gave me the same error.

Side bar: have you read Infinite Jest? I'm seriously on like the second page of that book.  It's so hard to read.  I feel like this guy intentionally tried to learn every word that normal people don't use on a regular basis and tried to jam it into the first two pages of this book.  This book feels super pretentious and the only reason that I'm even going to finish reading this book is because a friend of mine that I used to date recommended it.  [Incidentally, she's been acting weird.  I'm wondering if it has something to do with Valentine's Day or maybe a new bf?] Also, he is considered one of the most influential artists of the last 100 years or something like that and he also committed suicide.  The latter my seem like a weird reason for interest, but I think that people who kill themselves had to be thinking about some really deep shit so I'm always interested in getting insight into people who are in their own heads thinking to the point of taking themselves out.

Anyway, I'm basically frustrated with both Ruby on Rails and my lack of an ability to address even the simplest problems with Ruby after all of this effort.  I'm determined to learn to program, though, so it's just a thing, right now.  I refuse to give up.

Now, I have gone back to the book of Ruby...oh, and I've also started watching the lynda.com video tutorials for Ruby on Rails.  I've decided to learn this stuff by brute force, if necessary and if nothing else, I will be prepared to ask 10 million questions next week when I go to a Ruby meet up next Wednesday.  If you live in Atlanta, like me, this is the meet up: The Atlanta Ruby Meetup Group Monthly Meetup.

...happy programming.  One day, I'm going to get there.

Working through the Burnout

I'm sitting here watching the newest Workaholics episode.

The Book of Ruby is burning me out. I haven't read anything in all day. I think the back-to-back chapters on YAML and Marshal was a little bit too much; I had to take a break. Anyway, I went ahead and got started with Ruby on Rails.   I'm using this: Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Web Development with Rails.  I came up on it reading this article about learning RoR: Your Step-By-Step Guide To Learning How To Code And Getting A Job In This Lousy Economy.   Although I'm only at the beginning, it's a good escape from trying to concentrate on remember syntax, and starting this now will be good for re-enforcing what I've learned so far in Ruby, I hope. 

The Rails tutorial is supposed to be based on building actual projects, too, which I think will be good for my learning since I haven't really been doing actual programming exercises since I finished the Code Academy tutorial.

I've also been taking free online courses on Algorithms, Cyber-Security, Networking, and Entrepreneurship, so that is also a cool break from the book reading. So that's what's up, right now.

YAML and Marshal

Today I read the chapter on YAML and started the one on Marshal in The Book of Ruby...good times. :)

It's hard to remember everything, but I'm not really trying.  I plan to re-read the book when I'm done, as break from reading and working on other learning materials.  As I understand it, and please correct me  if I'm wrong about this, the coding that I would normally do in Ruby to make a program is the software that will be stored on my hard drive, and the information stored using YAML and Marshal are the temporary information that will be stored in ram for use in the program.

Apparently, you cannot save methods for for reuse using YAML, but you can do so using Marshal, which kind of makes me wonder why anyone would use YAML, at all.  This seems to be a theme in ruby, where there are multiple ways of doing things where one way is clearly more usable than the other.  If I am right about that, and I eventually write a book or tutorial, then I will only document the best practices and eliminate the things that I consider less than optimal.

Hopefully, I will finish this book by the end of the week and then start learning Ruby on Rails.  I have somethings in mind that I want to eventually build, but I think that I'll stick to the exercises on on Code Eval for now; I don't want to bite off more than I can chew and the levels of the challenges seems like a good way to work my way through the language.