Hilary,
When you first begin to learn about programming, your first obstacles
will have to do with basic language syntax, understanding how/when/why
to use variables, loops, conditional expressions, data structures, etc.
In the beginning, those basic building blocks may seem curious and
disjunct, but but you will use them constantly and directly every single
time you sit down to write any real code. As you get started, even
basics such as knowing how/why to indent lines of code can give you
trouble. Becoming familiar with the process of installing and working
in your development environment (your choice of OS, Ruby installation,
IDE/text/code editor, etc.), and executing and debugging snippets of
code, can take a while to become comfortable.
After you become familiar with the basic language concepts, tool set,
and work flow of writing/executing simple bits of code, you'll become
more able to use libraries and frameworks that do valuable things:
create GUI windows and widgets that obtain and display processed data
for the user, create web interfaces that obtain and display processed
data, work with graphics, media, compressed files, and other binary data
types, save/retrieve/manipulate text data in useful real-world ways,
manage larger data structures, perhaps control robots, or anything else
you want to accomplish... You'll settle on favorite
libraries/frameworks and become proficient at making them work together
to create full applications that do useful things for users. Along the
way, you'll learn to think more about designing sensible and efficient
user interfaces, you'll learn to handle usage problems that come from
how different people expect to use computer programs, you'll learn to
catch typical bugs that occur in text data processing, anticipate and
eliminate potential security weaknesses, deal with usability issues in
multiuser applications, etc. It can take years and many tens/hundreds
of thousands of lines of written code to really become proficient at
writing rock solid pieces of software that people use easily and
intuitively.
The problem with most tutorials and books for beginners is that they end
with the basics of language structure and bits about using
libraries/frameworks, etc. Once you understand enough basic syntax and
concepts like using loops to search and sort through lists of data, you
need to see and play with lots of code to actual working applications.
You need to see, experiment with, alter and write from scratch lots and
lots of working code. To get started with that, you could try, for
example, downloading wxRuby and playing with all the included code
examples. Take the GUI grid widget example and _alter_ the code to make
it display a sample data file that you've read from a file on the hard
drive. Put together a simple application that reads a directory of
image files, displays the file names in a text list, and then displays
the image when the file name is clicked. Write a small recipe database
application. Write a clone of a classic simple video game. Find a web
host that supports Ruby and learn how to enter data via HTML forms,
process that data with CGI, and display tables of the processed data
using HTML. Enter your sample data file into a MySQL database and write
the SQL code needed to search and sort that data by any field in the
database. When you get stuck, post a question online, with the code
you're trying to make work. You're likely to get detailed help when you
have specific questions about how to fix a small portion of
almost-working code.
I wrote a tutorial for the REBOL language which takes you through all
the stages of learning, including line by line documented code and full
case studies for more than 50 applications: http://re-bol.com. It's
been among the top 3 search results for "computer programming tutorial"
for several years. I'm currently rewriting that tutorial for Ruby, but
in the meantime, it should give you a nice complete understanding about
how to progress beyond just the basics. All the concepts will be
directly applicable to learning Ruby.
Hope that helps 
···
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