Zed Shaw has perfected the world's best system for learning Ruby. Follow it and you will succeedjust like the hundreds of thousands of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, commitment, and persistence; the author supplies everything else.
In Learn Ruby the Hard Way, Third Edition, you'll learn Ruby by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you'll learn how software works; what good programs look like; how to read, write, and think about code; and how to find and fix your mistakes using tricks professional programmers use. Most importantly, you'll learn the following, which you need to start writing excellent Ruby software of your own:
Installing your Ruby environment
Organizing and writing code
Ruby symbols and keywords
Basic mathematics
Variables and printing
Strings and text
Interacting with users
Working with files
Using and creating functions
Looping and logic
Arrays and elements
Hashmaps
Program design
Object-oriented programming
Inheritance and composition
Modules, classes, and objects
Project "skeleton" directories
Debugging and automated testing
Advanced user input
Text processing
Basic game development
Basic web development
It'll Be Hard At First. But Soon, You'll Just Get ItAnd That Will Feel Great!
This tutorial will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you'll know one of the world's most powerful, popular programming languages. You'll be a Ruby programmer.