[Ruby] PIMP: Ruby UW Certificate Program: new to list and structured learning

[Ryan Davis]

On Jul 23, 2007, at 17:01 , Ryan Ward wrote:

> I do have a question as well. I am fairly new to the Seattle area and
> curious if there are any college classes or programs that offer Ruby
> and or Rails classes.
>
> I came across this one, and not sure if anyone knows about these
> classes or if they are any good?
>
> http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/certificates/rby/rby_crs.asp

You force my hand... For weeks I've been sitting on a todo:

	"pimp UW course"

so, pimp I shall... YES, there is a certificate course at the UW  
starting this fall. It is 3 quarters long starting at rubynewb, then  
rails/web development, then rubyjedi. no, not the real titles. You  
are not required to take all three courses. do what feels right. To  
take just one:

	http://www.extension.washington.edu/ext/certificates/rby/rby_sce.asp

There is space available. apparently, plenty of space... so take make  
this a success, if you are interested or suspect someone you know is  
interested, PLEASE, help make it happen.

-----

Course syllabus for fall quarter is below:

     1. Basics

     2. Language Summary
         hello world
         invoking methods (go see ri)
         Basic datatypes: string, range, numbers, regexps, symbols
         Control flow structures: if/unless/case/loop/while/until

     3. Testing Concepts & Unit Testing

           From here on out, the classes and homework will be
           driven via tests:

           All homework will have impl and tests where the student
           needs to write tests for the impl and find any possible
           bugs and write impl for the tests to make them pass. By
           attacking on both sides, you'll get a better
           appreciation for TDD and still have real world examples
           of (buggy) code without tests.

     4. Language in More Detail
         Containers: Arrays, Hashes, Files... Enumerable
         More control flow
         Iterators & closures (incl syntax for x in y;
           break/redo/next/retry)
         Exception handling

     5. Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
         Classes
               is-a vs. has-a, instances vs classes
         Methods/messages
         Modules
               include/extend, when to use vs classes
         Philosophical: do the simplest thing that could possibly work

     6. Playing with Standard Libraries
         Libraries (find, time, yaml, marshal)
         RubyGems / RAA / rubyforge
         tcp chat server

     7. Projects Week 1: iTunes Data Mining, Inc.
           or self-driven project you'd rather.

     8. Projects Week 2: Student Driven
         Regular Expressions, CSV, Data Mining

     9. Projects Week 3: Extending by playing with Popular Libraries
         Hpricot - html/xml parser
         Mechanize - web scraper

     10. Playing Well with Others
         Working with & contributing to the open-source community