Subtitles of the Movie

Well, this our wrap-up video. I'm going to quickly recap what I've covered in this video series on programming with Ruby. I will walk through kind of an outline in this keynote presentation and perhaps hit some things that I might not have, uh, covered completely and say where you can get some additional help. So after an introduction, we went into what is programming and really the art of programming and the main thing I wanted to emphasis there is about having fun with programming. If you don't have fun with it, it's just drudgery. You have to enjoy it. It's rather like solving puzzles. And really the heart of being a really good programmer is understanding algorithms. And not always in a mathematical sense, but that certainly helps. An algorithm is the structured approach to solving some kind of problem. Then we went into what is Ruby, the language itself. We talked about what makes a computer language, what's the difference between that and just a scripting language, talked about compiled versus interpreted, little bit about virtual machines in Java and introduced the concept that in Ruby, everything is an object and we get into that more in depth in the later videos. We covered the basics of programming, the constructs, Booleans of different types, the different programming decision statements; if, unless, case statements, looping structures, arrays and then unique to Ruby are blocks. We went and covered how to install Ruby on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux with a package manager and also installing via command line for Linux and Mac OSX. We looked at the tools that are typically used with Ruby and includes the interpreter, the interactive Ruby, IRB, the Ruby documentation program, RI. We looked at Ruby gems and then various libraries that came with Ruby. Well, we looked at how to run programs with Ruby, uh, from Mac OSX and Linux and Windows and the differences there, how to use IRB on those platforms and then how to use FXRI on Windows. We also gave an introduction to object-oriented program, although this really calls for its own set of video series to really do this properly because it's such a huge subject. But we talked about what classes an object are, how to instantiate a class and different types of variables that are in classes. We talked about what methods are, how program flow works. Then we went into some basic Ruby, unique things to Ruby such as duct typing, how variables and constants and scope work, various expressions, operator expressions, assignment conditionals, those types of things. We talked about string because a lot of what you do with scripting languages, you're manipulating strings, either in files or stuff you're getting from users, so we look at what is a string, printing a string, formatting, manipulating strings, tearing them apart, putting them together to create new strings, searching strings, those types of things. Then we went into basic IO, how to print something out and how to get something in using gets and puts and then we played around with the highline library a little bit. We looked at how to work with files and directories, open and closing files reading files, writing them, the difference between binary files versus text files, using directories and also we played around with a little bit of comma-separated files to just get an idea how that reads in and what not. We looked at regular expressions, REGEXs, how to create them and how to use them. We did some stuff with math. What are numbers? How does Ruby represent them? Basic operations, floating points, what are big decimal numbers? We look at some advanced math operations, including logarithms, those kinds of things. We played around a little bit with some random numbers, generated some of those. We talked about symbols and ranges were and how we use those things, especially ranges. We looked at dates and times, how to represent them, how to manipulate them a little bit and compare them, play and move forward and backward with them and formatting them for output. We did a bunch of stuff on arrays, hashes and manipulating the two and what they really are and hopefully you gained a pretty good understanding what they are. We looked at some advanced data structures such as sets, stacks and queues and then we did a Tower of Hanoi program to see how you could use a stack. We did a little bit more with object-oriented programming we did your own classes and a few advanced things with OOE. We looked at what graphical interfaces are available to a program with Ruby, so we looked at FX Ruby, Ruby GTK2, WX Ruby, Ruby Coco and then we briefly touched on Ruby TK and QT Ruby. We looked briefly at threading a Ruby, but frankly, this is going to be changing in the very near future so I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on this because it will quickly become outdated and I don't really know what the future holds other than it will be in the system and I'm not sure how the syntax will change with that. We did some stuff on scripting and system administration, how to access other programs on your system, how to do the same on Windows, uh, getting some command-line options with your program and getting command-line arguments with your program and then how to access environmental variables from your program. We looked at testing and debugging, how to do unit testing and what it is. We looked at some simple network programming, both from a client perspective and from the server perspective with Ruby and created some simple little clients to access some web pages and also saw a simple little server to do a little chatting between telnet sessions. We looked at how to create some web apps. Very simple with CGI and touched on Ruby on Rails and I also wanted to remind you that Ruby on Rails training is available from VTC as a separate video series and it's a whole environment unto itself. Finally, we finished up with looking at some web services available in Ruby, also print resources hat are out there, books that are available. We talked about where you should go next as a programmer, what you need to do and this is our wrap-up and there's a little bit about me in one of the videos. So I hope you've enjoyed this video series and you find it useful in your education about Ruby and programming.