5am Challenge - Day 1 (officially...)

Even staying up a little later than I typically do, I still managed to force myself out of bed around 5:05 this morning. It's actually not so bad once you actually stand up for a minute or two and force yourself out of the comfort and warmth of bed. I let the dogs out as usual, grabbed a quick cup of coffee, and now time for a quick update before I dive back into my studies.

One thing to mention for those that have been following along... I've heard some great advice from other bloggers (about code) that I thought would be useful and I'm going to follow a similar format. That is, I'm really writing these for me as a refresher, and if I'm able to provide value for other readers great! The basic idea is that I can blog about things I learn, and it keeps a running record of documentation (or notes) on topics and problems I encounter. That way if I run into something similar down the road I can think to myself..."aha..I wrote a blog post about that way back when..." and search back and find my notes.

I'm getting to the point with code where I can start to read and understand, but it takes me longer to actually write or come up with my own code. It's very similar to learning a foreign language, like Spanish for example. I took a few years of Spanish in high school, and while to this day I can read certain things and understand the gist, it is much harder to listen and understand a native Spanish speaker, and even harder for me to form more than a very basic sentence that even a 4 or 5 year old would say.

I'm currently working on Ruby because I'm trying to get the syntax down enough so that I can implement my Data Structures in Ruby as well as Java. Java is a lot more rigid and you have to directly state certain things, whereas in Ruby you can write less code and accomplish the same thing. Ruby reads a lot like pseudo code (very similar to plain English just explaining on how a block of code would work without worrying about exact syntax).

For example, here is one simple line of Ruby that anybody can probably guess what it does:

    def greeting(name)
          puts "Hello #{name}!"
    end

   greeting("World")


As you might have guessed, the output of this simple Ruby script would read "Hello World!"

I spent about 2 hours yesterday morning and another 30-45 minutes yesterday evening both working through the CodeAcademy (www.codeacademy.com) Ruby Tutorial as well as updated my first problem I'm trying to implement in Ruby. I at least got the first part working which is really just an Array class to construct my arrays from. I got to the Object Oriented section of the Ruby tutorial which really helped because it also reminded me of Instance variables and what scope I need to provide which variables. I'm pretty sure the reason my initial solution was not working was for this very reason. I was trying to call a variable from a different method that did not have access to that variable. Here is the little bit of code so far, but I should get a lot more of it done today:

Yes it doesn't look like much for over 2 hours, but it was more studying through CodeAcademy and then refactoring my code to make this first part work, so I'm proud of it! That's it for today...time for some studying!