enjoying ruby without rails

Still very new with all this, but I’m very much enjoying playing with Ruby, more so than with Rails.  In the past two weeks, as my current job winds down, I’ve been using Ruby’s built-in classes, modules and methods to write small but useful scripts.  These scripts have solved some problems for me in my current work, which is sorting and filtering a lot of data, typcially using MS Excel functions.  So I bought a great book called “Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts”, by Steve Pugh.  Some examples of the scripts in the book,

-  check the validity of links on a web pages,

- resize pictures en masse, using ImageMagick and RMagick.

I’m also finishing up David Black’s Ruby for Rails which, in conjunction with a lot of online tutorials and examples, has accounted for most of my Ruby reading/studying over past few months. For anyone looking to start learning Ruby,  I recommend “Ruby for Rails”.  Once you understand Ruby basics, “Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts” serves as an example of the fun stuff you can do.  David Black has a new book coming out soon, called “The Well-Grounded Rubyist”, that I’ll be sure to look into once I’m finished with all the books I’ve ordered.

Man I’ve become a huge nerd.

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