I am going to second and third and fourth www.codeschool.com. I know codecademy gets a lot of love, but I'm pretty sure that's only because people don't know about Code School. I would turn to NetTuts courses for PHP, especially Laravel 4 (greatest PHP-thing ever), but that's *only because Code School focuses more on Ruby than PHP.*

Not to belabor the point ... - well, yes, to belabor it: www.codeschool.com for the win.

Michael / Front-End Librarian at www.ns4lib.com and The Web for Libraries Weekly

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of James Stuart
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2013 2:23 PM
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?)

I'll put a rec out for CodeSchool. They started mostly with ruby, but they've expanded into a wide array of courses (only a few of which are free). But they're slick, well thought-through affairs, and Try Ruby/Rails for Zombies is still I think the best introduction to Rails out there.

http://www.codeschool.com/


On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Jason Stirnaman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> 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
> >
>