1st Week of Progress: 12/10/14

Seven days in and unlike in the gym, I can already see some real gains.

Though I did a lot of window shopping for what I'm going to be using in the following weeks, I only used teamtreehouse this week to get a solid introduction to Ruby.

After a week of tinkering, I am able to create an interactive questionnaire that can do a bunch of random things that have no practical application. What I'd like to do this week is create a Ruby program that can tell you how much money you'll spend on gas driving from A to B. Taking car model, miles driven, $/gal, under consideration.

What I've Used

• Treehouse: Ruby Basics
• Treehouse: Ruby Operators and Control Structures 
• Treehouse: Ruby Collections

This week I've worked at a slower pace than I would've liked. Only four days were spent coding, spending anywhere from 2-5hrs each day.

I think once I feel I have a good enough handle on Ruby, I'm going to try the One Month Rails course for $99.

I never thought I'd pay for material when free learning material is ubiquitous on the web. The appeal this course offers is that they'll provide a guided path teaching you only the essentials that you would need to prototype an idea.

This is for people who don't have the time to learn anything unnecessary and are more interested in starting their own projects than learning code for the sake of finding a job. 

Some things I've learned this Week

• Stack Overflow is a tremendous resource for troubleshooting problems. If somebody hasn't already asked your question, you will easily get an answer in minutes.

• Quora is an amazing resource for motivation and interesting insights from professionals. This probably is true for more than just learning to code. The community is awesome.

Some Interesting Links I found this Week

• What I’d Tell My Younger Self About Learning HTML/CSS, An interesting article for those starting HTML/CSS. Shows you the bigger picture before you start, quick read too.

• How to Teach Yourself to Code. Just incase you needed more convincing that you should learn to code. 

• Build Products. A great, quick article by a woman who took 2 years off from work to teach herself to code. She has a lot of great insights- I'd say a must read for anyone teaching themselves to code, especially if you're out of college. 

A very promising endeavor, there's much to look forward to.

As always, stay tuned.