Course Introduction

Quick reference

• 00:04 Welcome to Intro to Ruby Programming.
• 00:06 My name is John Elder and I'll be your instructor today.
• 00:08 In this course we're going to learn everything you need to learn in order to
• 00:11 start coding in Ruby.
• 00:12 And Ruby is one of those programming languages, it's just a lot of fun to use.
• 00:16 It's what I like to call a programmer's programming language.
• 00:20 A lot of programming languages, not so fun.
• 00:22 JavaScript, we use it all the time for everything web-related,
• 00:26 but it's not that fun to actually code JavaScript.
• 00:29 Ruby, on the other hand, it's just fun.
• 00:31 It's easy to read, it's easy to write, it's just a joy to use.
• 00:34 And so if you ask any Ruby programmer, they're going to tell you the same thing.
• 00:37 So I'm glad you're taking the course.
• 00:38 I think you're going to have a lot of fun.
• 00:40 And before we get started I want to just mention really quickly,
• 00:43 sometimes we see a little confusion between Ruby on Rails and Ruby.
• 00:47 And they're two very separate, very different things.
• 00:50 Ruby on Rails is a web platform that lets you build websites.
• 00:54 And Ruby is the underlying programming language that Rails was built on.
• 00:59 So this is not a course in Rails.
• 01:01 We're not going to look at Rails,
• 01:03 we're not going to do anything at all even remotely related to Rails.
• 01:06 So if you're looking for a Rails course, this is not the course for you.
• 01:09 This is just Ruby and, like I said, Ruby is a programing language.
• 01:13 So if you're a Rails programmer and you're looking to become a better Rails
• 01:17 programmer by learning Ruby, that's a great strategy.
• 01:20 I think you should definitely do that.
• 01:21 And then you're going to get a lot out of this course.
• 01:24 If, on the other hand, you don't care about Ruby at all, you're looking for
• 01:27 a Rails course.
• 01:27 Like I said, this is not it.
• 01:28 So in this course specifically, I'll just break down really quickly what we're
• 01:32 going to be learning throughout the course.
• 01:34 First we'll set up a development environment, lets us do all of our coding.
• 01:37 And then we'll jump right into very basic programming concepts.
• 01:41 Things like variables, strings, math stuff, If statements,
• 01:45 else statements and string manipulation.
• 01:48 Then we'll jump into more intermediate concepts, things like arrays, loops.
• 01:52 We'll do lots of loops, while loops, until loops, for loops, each loops,
• 01:56 all kinds of loops.
• 01:57 And then we'll do hashes, methods, and random numbers.
• 02:00 And that pretty much rounds out the intermediate section.
• 02:03 After that we're going to move into advanced topics.
• 02:05 And for the most part, the advanced topics are going to revolve around classes.
• 02:09 Classes are a very object-oriented type of thing, and sometimes it takes a while for
• 02:13 them to wrap their brains around it.
• 02:15 So we're going to spend a good amount of time on classes.
• 02:17 And you're going to find out they're not that difficult once we really get into it.
• 02:20 So after classes, we'll look at files.
• 02:22 You'll be able to open files, read files, write files,
• 02:25 do all kinds of filey type things.
• 02:27 And we'll end up learning how to add third-party functionality to your
• 02:31 programs.
• 02:32 And we're going to use something called gems, it's a Ruby gem.
• 02:35 Sort of a theme going on there.
• 02:36 So that's pretty much the course at the end,
• 02:38 we're going to build a math flash card app.
• 02:40 And, I can just come down here and run it real quick.
• 02:44 It's just addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.
• 02:47 What is 3 + 4?
• 02:48 7, correct.
• 02:49 Just very simple.
• 02:50 But it's going to let us take all the things that we learned throughout
• 02:53 the course and sort of put them all together and get a tangible sort of thing
• 02:57 that you can look at afterward and say, I built that, that's kind of cool.
• 03:00 So it's a fun little project.
• 03:02 You can see, not that complicated.
• 03:04 Just a one page of code, really.
• 03:07 And you can see just looking at this, this is easily readable stuff.
• 03:10 That's one of the things about Ruby, it's easy to read, it's easy to write.
• 03:13 It's a lot of fun to use.
• 03:15 And it's really just a joy to work with.
• 03:17 It sounds goofy but it really is a joy to work with.
• 03:19 And I hope you find that out throughout this course.
• 03:21 So in the next video we're going to jump right in.
• 03:23 We're going to build our development environment.
• 03:25 It's this thing right here that allows us to write all of our code and
• 03:28 do all of our stuff.
• 03:29 And should be a lot of fun and I'll see you in the next video.

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