Refreshing Ruby Knowledge

I see a trend in system administration tasks moving toward the Ruby programming language. Yes, you can still code in Perl, Python, Shell, etc., but Ruby seems to be growing in popularity as a choice in scripting language. It should be – it is certainly easier to type and it has a big community to go with it. I was first introduced to Ruby in 2009 and immediately after learning Ruby, I learned Ruby on Rails. At the time, Rails and the MVC model was too advanced for me and so I never used my knowledge. Mostly because Rails had many “does this automatically so you do not need to include it in your code” so it was difficult for a beginner.

Now nearly 7 years later, I am taking Ruby off my virtual bookshelf and blowing the bugs off of it and refreshing my knowledge – this time leaving Rails out of the picture. So far I am liking plain Ruby. Below are some resources I have used to sharpen my Ruby skills.

https://rubymonk.com/

http://rubykoans.com/

http://exercism.io/

Bonus: Setting up the exercism client on Fedora 24

The exercism client is written in Go. Go can fetch and install other Go programs as long as you have a Go workspace set up. To do that we will issue the following commands:

# To install go
sudo dnf install golang

# To set up the workspace
mkdir -p ~/gocode/{bin,src,pkg}
echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/gocode' >> ~/.profile
echo 'export export PATH=$PATH:$GOROOT/bin:$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.profile
source ~/.profile

Those commands will set up the Go workspace and allow you to issue the next command: go get -u github.com/exercism/cli/exercism