I've heard similar good things about Codecademy from a friend who recently wanted to start learning programming along with his teenage son. It seems like a good gateway drug :) I introduced my 11-year-old to the Javascript-based animation tutorials on Khan Academy and he found them really fun. I have him use IRB to calculate his math homework. I don't care which, if any, language he prefers. It's more important to me that he's able to think "under the hood" a bit about computers, data, and what's possible.

I've been thinking alot about how to introduce not only my kids, but some of our cataloging/technical staff to thinking "programmatically" or "computationally"[1] or whatever you want to call it. For me, Ruby will likely be the tool - especially since it's so easy to install on Windows now, too. 

In her wisdom, Diane Hillman (I think), pointed out the need for catalogers to be able talk to programmers. Personally, that's what I'm after... to equip people to think about problems, data, and networks differently, e.g. "No, you really don't have to look up each record individually in the catalog and check the link", etc.


1. http://www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking/

Jason Stirnaman
Digital Projects Librarian
A.R. Dykes Library
University of Kansas Medical Center
913-588-7319

________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Matthew Sherman [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2013 10:18 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Getting started with Ruby and library-ish data (was RE: [CODE4LIB] You *are* a coder. So what am I?)

Getting back to the original point so noting some nice starting tools, I
find http://www.codecademy.com to be a decent starting spot for those of us
without much computer science background.  I am not sure what professional
developers think of the site but I find it a helpful to tutorial to start
getting a basic understanding of scripting, Ruby, JavaScript, Python,
JQuery, APIs, ect.  Hope that helps.

Matt Sherman


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Jason Stirnaman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> This is a terribly distorted view of Ruby: "If you want to make web pages,
> learn Ruby", and you don't need to learn Rails to get the benefit of Ruby's
> awesomeness. But, everyone will have their own opinions. There's no
> accounting for taste.
>
> For anyone interested in learning to program and hack around with library
> data or linked data, here are some places to start (heavily biased toward
> the elegance of Ruby):
>
> http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Working_with_MaRC
> https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+books
> https://delicious.com/jstirnaman/ruby+tutorials
> http://rdf.rubyforge.org/
>
> Jason
>
> Jason Stirnaman
> Digital Projects Librarian
> A.R. Dykes Library
> University of Kansas Medical Center
> 913-588-7319
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Joe
> Hourcle [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Sunday, February 17, 2013 12:52 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] You *are* a coder. So what am I?
>
> On Feb 17, 2013, at 11:43 AM, John Fereira wrote:
>
> > I have been writing software "professionally" since around 1980 and
> first encounterd perl in the early 1990s of so and have *always* disliked
> it.   Last year I had to work on a project that was mostly developed in
> perl and it reminded me how much I disliked it.  As a utility language, and
> one that I think is good for beginning programmers (especially for those
> working in a library) I'd recommend PHP over perl every time.
>
> I'll agree that there are a few aspects of Perl that can be confusing, as
> some functions will change behavior depending on context, and there was a
> lot of bad code examples out there.*
>
> ... but I'd recommend almost any current mainstream language before
> recommending that someone learn PHP.
>
> If you're looking to make web pages, learn Ruby.
>
> If you're doing data cleanup, Perl if it's lots of text, Python if it's
> mostly numbers.
>
> I should also mention that in the early 1990s would have been Perl 4 ...
> and unfortunately, most people who learned Perl never learned Perl 5.  It's
> changed a lot over the years.  (just like PHP isn't nearly as insecure as
> it used to be ... and actually supports placeholders so you don't end up
> with SQL injections)
>
> -Joe
>