Optional Material
The following exercises are not required! However, if you have more time you’d like to spend before class, here are some further resources.
Typing
Believe it or not, a lot of time in the first weeks of programming is spent fixing simple typing errors.If you don’t know how to touch type (i.e. type without looking at the keyboard), try to spend some time each day working on touch typing (you can try Keybr). If you already know how to touch type, I would still recommend working through the Ruby on Rails lessons on Typing.io. Typing for programming is actually a good bit different than everyday typing, so getting some practice in could potentially save you a ton of time the first few weeks of class.
More Ruby
- The rest of Codecademy’s Ruby track. I recommend this with hesitation, since my opinion is that it is not very helpful past the basics. Once the concepts get harder, we tend to just type what they want us to rather than really getting the concepts. However, it could be nice for some people.
- Rubeque. This is a fun site for solving problems in Ruby. You get points when you solve them, and they’re all rated from easy to ridiculous.
- Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. Although it doesn’t go into depth on too many topics, it’s a great overview, it gets you coding, and the book is free to read online. Please note, though, that he uses a few different development tools in the book than we’ll use in the class (he uses Cloud9 for writing code while we’ll use Atom; he uses Bitbucket for source code while we’ll use GitHub). If possible, use the tools we’ve asked you to install on the Mac Setup page. If this causes confusion, let me know and I’ll assist.
More HTML
- Shay Howe’s HTML/CSS Tutorial. Only if you really have extra time.
- UX Myths. We’re not going to go into many UX design principles during our class, but it’s sort of a fun world (and quite big). This is a set of fun articles if you geek out over what you should and shouldn’t do with your user interfaces.