Installations

The plan at the start of the blog was to do a post for each week that we've covered so far & then once up to date try to update each week with 2/3 posts on what's happening on the course.  This will be a quick run through of week 2.

This was when we started into programming, specifically Ruby programming.  It's apparently one of the easiest programming languages to learn, compared to a procedural language like C++ or Java.  This being my first experience of learning any programming language, I can't vouch for it being any more or less intuitive than other languages.  Aside from the lectures & tutorials, we have access to a number of books & online tutorials.  One of these, Learn Ruby The Hard Way by Zed Shaw has been the mainstay of my Ruby learning so far.  I've seen & heard references to an "Aha" moment that people get when learning programming - I'm keeping on top of stuff as I'm doing these exercises, but I'm not sure if that breakthrough has happened yet.

Week 2 was also the start of what seems to be a never-ending cycle of installing, upgrading, updating.  Shortly before the course started, my home computer started to slow considerably, so I decided to install some extra RAM to see if it would help.  Later, to get access to the App Store, I had to upgrade from Snow Leopard OS X to Lion.  To start working with Ruby, I had to check if it was installed (yes), & was it an up to date version (no).  Since then, I've downloaded, installed or updated the following:

• GCC compiler
• RVM(Ruby Version Manager)
• Ruby (v 1.9.3)
• Rails (v 3.2.3)
• Sqlite2
• MySql Community Edition 
• Firebug

Installing MySql involved a particularly steep learning & having contributed some feedback to a course forum on that topic already, I might use that as a post topic in itself later in the week.  Until then...