Sam's Journey

7 Hours of Video Instruction
In Learn Enough Ruby to Be Dangerous: Write Programs, Publish Gems, and Develop Sinatra Web Apps with Ruby, renowned instructor Michael Hartl teaches the concepts, skills, and approaches you need to be professionally productive with Ruby for both general-purpose programming and beginning web app development.OverviewProgrammers love Ruby for its elegance, power, and flexibility: that’s why it was chosen for the Ruby on Rails framework that launched websites from Shopify to Coinbase. You’ll love Ruby too, but you don’t need to learn “everything” about it, just how to use it efficiently to solve real problems. Best-selling author and leading Rails developer Michael Hartl gets you started writing practical and modern Ruby programs as fast as possible, with a focus on the real tools used every day by software developers. You’ll learn how to use Ruby interactively, write shell scripts in Ruby, and use Ruby to make simple dynamic web applications.Even if you’re new to programming, Hartl helps you quickly build technical sophistication as you gain a solid understanding of object-oriented and functional programming, develop and publish a self-contained Ruby package (a gem), and use your gem to build and deploy a dynamic web app with the Sinatra framework. Focused exercises help you internalize what matters, without wasting time on details pros don’t care about. Soon, it’ll be like you were born knowing this stuff—and you’ll be suddenly, seriously dangerous.About the InstructorMichael Hartl is the creator of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, one of the leading introductions to web development, and is cofounder and principal author at Learn Enough. Previously, he was a physics instructor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a PhD in Physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator entrepreneur program.Skill LevelBeginner to intermediateLearn How To
Create a simple “hello, world” program using several different techniquesDeploy a simple dynamic Ruby application to the webUse strings, arrays, and other native objectsDefine functionsUse Ruby for functional programmingUtilize test-driven developmentWrite a shell scriptDevelop a full Ruby web application for detecting palindromes Who Should Take This CourseNew and experienced developers looking for a practical introduction to Ruby. The course can also serve as a prerequisite for the popular Ruby on Rails Tutorial or as a natural follow-up to it. Course RequirementsThe only prerequisites are a familiarity with basic developer tools (command line, text editor, and Git) and beginning HTML Some programming experience is useful but is not required Lesson DescriptionsLesson 1: Hello World!
Lesson 1 begins at the beginning by having you create four simple “hello, world” programs using several different techniques. The main purpose of the “hello, world” is to make sure your system is correctly configured to execute the simple program that prints the string “hello, world!” to the screen. You start by writing a series of programs to display a greeting at a command line terminal, first in a REPL called irb (interactive Ruby), then from a file, and then from a shell script. Finally, you write and deploy a simple proof-of-concept web application using the Sinatra web framework.Lesson 2: Strings
Lesson 2 covers strings, probably the most important data structure on the web since web pages ultimately consist of strings and characters sent to and from the browser. Many other kinds of programs require string manipulation as well. Thus, strings are a great place to start your Ruby programming journey. The lesson starts with what strings are and how to create them, including both single- and double-quoted strings. You then learn how to join, or concatenate, one string to another. Next, you learn how to print to the screen from the terminal window. As part of this, you see your first examples of Ruby boolean variables and control flow. Finally, you learn how to iterate over strings with for loops, enabling you to access strings one character at a time.Lesson 3: Arrays
In Lesson 2, you learned that strings can be thought of sequences of characters in a particular order. In Lesson 3, you learn about the array data type, which is the general Ruby container for arbitrary elements in a particular order. You start by explicitly connecting strings and arrays via the string split method, and then you learn about various array methods throughout the rest of the lesson. After learning to split strings, you learn how to access elements in the resulting array, discovering that the same syntax works on strings, further deepening the connection between the two data types. Next, you learn a variety of additional array methods beginning with selecting both single elements and multiple elements at once using array slicing, including the useful range datatype, and a clever technique using range indices to select the last element in an array. Then you learn how to sort arrays, which, if you have ever written a sorting algorithm by hand, you will find Ruby makes ridiculously easy. You also learn how to reverse arrays, a capability you will put to good use later on in the tutorial when learning to detect palindromes. Next, you learn how to add and remove array elements using push and pop, including an introduction to the important shovel operator. You then learn how to undo a string split with an array and join. Finally, you learn how to iterate through arrays using the same kind of for loop covered in Lesson 2, which is valuable preparation for more advanced techniques covered in Lessons 5 and 6.Lesson 4: Other Native Objects
Now that we have taken a look at strings and arrays, Lesson 4 continues with a tour of some other important Ruby objects, which gives you a chance to learn about math, dates, regular expressions, and hashes. Like most programming languages, Ruby supports a large number of mathematical operations right out of the box, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It also includes a math library with more advanced operations such as logarithms and trigonometric functions. You also learn how to deal with times and dates in Ruby, such as getting the year, the day, or the exact time. This gives you your first chance to use the new function, a so-called constructor function, which is the standard Ruby way to create a new object. This lesson includes an introduction to the powerful subject of regular expressions, which are discussed briefly in Learn Enough Developer Tools to be Dangerous in the context of text editors and the grep command. Often called regexes for short, regular expressions are a powerful mini-language for matching patterns in text. You learn how to use regexes to quickly search strings for things like five digits in a row, thereby matching standard United States ZIP codes. The lesson ends with an introduction to hashes in Ruby. You use such objects to create collections of key–value pairs, sometimes known as associative arrays, which are like regular arrays but with strings instead of integers as indices. You apply this important object type to write your first substantial Ruby program, a shell script to count the unique words in a text.Lesson 5: Functions and Blocks
So far in this tutorial, Ruby functions have been mentioned repeatedly, and in Lesson 5 you finally learn to define functions of your own. The resulting ability gives us greater flexibility as programmers and enables powerful techniques like the each method, which is covered in this lesson, and functional programming, which is the subject of Lesson 6. You begin your study of functions in the read-eval-print loop, that is, the REPL, and then you learn how to put your function definitions in a file for use in a simple Sinatra web application. The lesson also covers how to use multiple functions in a row, a technique known as method chaining. Method chaining is used to make a first definition of a palindrome function to see whether a string is the same forward and backward. The lesson ends with a discussion of the each method of iterating through arrays, which often provides a more convenient way of processing array elements than the for loop introduced in Lesson 2. This gives you your first introduction to blocks, a feature Ruby shares with only a few other languages and which are the source of much of Ruby’s unusual flexibility and power.Lesson 6: Functional Programming
Having learned how to define functions and apply them in a couple of different contexts. In Lesson 6, you take your programming to the next level by learning the basics of functional programming, a style of programming that emphasizes, you guessed it, functions. This is a challenging lesson, and you may have to watch it a couple of times to absorb everything, but the rewards are rich indeed. It focuses on the triumvirate of functions commonly used in functional programming, that is, map, select, and reduce. The first of our examples is the map function, which lets you map a function over an array of elements. It is often a powerful alternative to looping. The second function covered is select, which enables you to select your data based on some boolean criterion. For example, you can take an array of integers and select for only numbers evenly divisible by two, giving you a quick way to select only the even numbers in the array. The third function is the mighty reduce, which is exactly the kind of powerful technique that can take lots of examples to really sink in but enables you to write remarkably clean and concise code. Because reduce, and indeed all functional techniques, can be challenging to understand even for experienced developers, it is especially powerful when combined with test-driven development, which is covered in Lesson 8.Lesson 7: Objects and Classes
In Lesson 7, you learn how to make your very own Ruby objects, which can have both attributes, which are data, and methods, which are functions, attached to them. The way to define objects in Ruby is using the class method, which gives rise to an object constructor function that can be used to create or instantiate a new object called an instance using the new method you first saw in Lesson 4. This gives you the background needed to understand Ruby’s object system, which pervades the language. Indeed, it is often said that everything in Ruby is an object. In this lesson you learn the precise technical meaning of this description. You start with a concrete example of a phrase object that knows whether or not the phrase is a palindrome. You then add a translated phrase object that overrides the main palindrome method and substitutes a translated phrase instead. These examples enable you to understand inheritance and derived classes, which are key ideals in object-oriented programming. The lesson even discusses the powerful, even dangerous, practice of modifying native Ruby objects. This enables us to modify the string class itself, giving every string the capability to tell whether or not it is a palindrome. Finally, we learn about Ruby modules, also called mixins. Ruby modules give us a way to factor out common functionality and then mix it into multiple classes, which is a great way to avoid duplication and reuse code.Lesson 8: Testing and Test-Driven Development
Although rarely covered in introductory programming tutorials, automated testing is one of the most important subjects in modern software development. Accordingly, Lesson 8 gives you an introduction to testing in Ruby, including a first look at test-driven development, or TDD. Test-driven development came up briefly in Lesson 6, where we promised that you would use testing techniques to add an important capability to finding palindromes, namely being able to detect complicated palindromes such as, “A man a plan a canal—Panama!” or “Madam, I’m Adam”. This lesson fulfills that promise. You start by setting up our system for testing using the minitest framework. The strategy for testing the current palindrome code and extending it to more complicated phrases is as follows. One, set up your system for automating testing. Two, write automated tests for the existing palindrome functionality. Three, write a failing test for the enhanced palindrome detector known as red. This is the first step in the TDD cycle known as red, green, refactor. Four, write possibly ugly code to get the test passing, also known as green, which is the second step in red, green, refactor. Five, refactor the code, which involves changing its form without changing its function. Because the code should accomplish the same results the entire time, the test suite should remain green even after refactoring, thereby completing the red, green, refactor cycle. As it turns out, learning how to write Ruby tests also gives you a chance to learn how to create and use self-contained software packages called Ruby gems, another valuable skill for longer Ruby programming.Lesson 9: Shell Scripts
In Lesson 8 you build on the foundation laid in the previous lessons and write three shell scripts of increasing sophistication. Although web development is probably the most common application of Ruby programming nowadays, shell scripting is Ruby’s native habitat, so it is a task at which Ruby understandably excels. Indeed, readers who have studied the analogous material in the context of JavaScript may be impressed at how much more elegant and polished the Ruby versions are. In the first two programs, you take the Ruby gem developed in Lesson 8 and put it to work detecting palindromes drawn from two different sources: a file and the web. In the process, you learn how to read and write from files with Ruby and also how to read a live web URL. (This latter example has especially personal meaning to the author, as he distinctly remembers the first time he wrote an automated program to read and process text from the web, which at the time seemed truly miraculous.) Finally, you write a real-life utility program adapted from one the author once wrote for himself. It includes an introduction to manipulation of the document object model, or DOM, in the context outside of a web browser. This is the sort of thing you might expect from a browser-centric language like JavaScript, but it turns out you can do it with Ruby as well.Lesson 10: A Live Web Application
As a final application of your newfound Ruby powers, in this final lesson you build a dynamic web application. The app puts the custom Ruby gem developed in Lesson 8 to good use through the development of a web-based palindrome detector. Along the way, you learn how to create dynamic content using embedded Ruby, or ERB. Detecting palindromes from the web requires using a back-end web application to handle form submission, and our tool of choice is Sinatra, the micro-framework you met in Lesson 1 and applied further in Lesson 5. Although simple, Sinatra is not a toy. It is a production-ready web framework used by companies like Stripe, Apple, and Disney. Our palindrome map also features two other pages, home and about, which give you an opportunity to learn how to use a Ruby-based site layout. As part of this, you apply and extend the work in Lesson 8 to write automated tests for your app. As in Lesson 1, your final step is to deploy your palindrome map to the live web. The lesson ends with pointers to further resources for Ruby, Sinatra, and other topics like JavaScript and Ruby on Rails.About Pearson Video Training
Pearson publishes expert-led video tutorials covering a wide selection of technology topics designed to teach you the skills you need to succeed. These professional and personal technology videos feature world-leading author instructors published by your trusted technology brands: Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification, Sams, and Que. Topics include: IT Certification, Network Security, Cisco Technology, Programming, Web Development, Mobile Development, and more. Learn more about Pearson Video training at http://www.informit.com/video.

7+ Hours of Video InstructionIn Learn Enough JavaScript to Be Dangerous: A Tutorial Introduction to Programming with JavaScript, renowned instructor Michael Hartl teaches the concepts, skills, and approaches you need to be professionally productive with JavaScript for both interactive websites and for general-purpose programming.OverviewJavaScript is the programming language of the World Wide Web, and it is also developing into a powerful general-purpose programming language. You’ll love the way this series teaches programming with JavaScript, where you don’t need to learn “everything” about it—just how to use it efficiently to solve real problems. Best-selling author Michael Hartl teaches JavaScript by getting you started writing practical and modern JavaScript programs as fast as possible, with a focus on the real tools used every day by software developers.Even if you’re new to programming, Hartl helps you quickly build technical sophistication as you gain a solid understanding of JavaScript for object-oriented and functional programming, including making JavaScript modules with test-driven development and Node.js. Focused exercises help you internalize what matters, without wasting time on details pros don’t care about. Soon, it’ll be like you were born knowing this stuff—and you’ll be suddenly, seriously dangerous.About the InstructorMichael Hartl is the creator of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, one of the leading introductions to web development, and is cofounder and principal author at Learn Enough. Previously, he was a physics instructor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a graduate of Harvard College, has a PhD in physics from Caltech, and is an alumnus of the Y Combinator entrepreneur program.Skill LevelBeginner to intermediateLearn How ToCreate a simple “hello, world” program using several different techniquesDeploy a simple dynamic JavaScript application to the webUse strings, arrays, and other native objectsDefine functionsUse JavaScript for functional programmingUtilize test-driven development and publish a Node moduleWrite shell scriptsDevelop an interactive JavaScript image gallery applicationWho Should Take This CourseNew programmers and developers looking for a practical introduction to JavaScriptCourse RequirementsThe only prerequisites are a familiarity with basic developer tools (command line, text editor, and Git) plus beginning HTML and a little CSSSome programming experience is useful but not requiredLesson DescriptionsLesson 1: Hello World!
In Lesson 1, you begin your study of JavaScript with four variations on the time-honored theme of a “Hello, World!” program. The main purpose of “Hello, World!” is to confirm that your system is correctly configured to execute a simple program that prints the string “Hello, World!” or some close variant to the screen. By design, the program is simple, enabling you to focus on the challenge of getting the program to run in the first place. In order to give you the best broad-range introduction to programming with JavaScript, Learn Enough JavaScript to Be Dangerous uses four main methods: one, front-end JavaScript programs running in the user’s browser; two, an interactive prompt with a Node.js read, evaluate, print, loop, also called a REPL; three, standalone JavaScript files, including the Node Package Manager; and four, shell scripts, introduced in Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous. Since the original and still most common application of JavaScript is to write programs that execute on the web, we’ll start by writing and deploying a program to display “Hello, World!” in a web browser. We’ll then write a series of three programs using the JavaScript execution system, Node.js, first in the node REPL, then in a JavaScript library file called hello.js, and finally, in an executable shell script simply called hello.Lesson 2: Strings
Lesson 2 covers strings, probably the most important data structure on the Web since web pages ultimately consist of strings and characters sent to and from the browser. Many other kinds of programs require string manipulation as well. Thus, strings are a great place to start your Ruby programming journey. The lesson starts with what strings are and how to create them, including both single- and double-quoted strings. You then learn how to join, or concatenate, one string to another. Next, you learn how to print to the screen from the terminal window. As part of this, you see your first examples of JavaScript boolean variables and control flow. Finally, you learn how to iterate over strings with for loops, enabling you to access strings one character at a time.Lesson 3: Arrays
In Lesson 3, you learn about the array data type, which is the general JavaScript container for arbitrary elements in a particular order. You start by explicitly connecting strings and arrays via the string split method and then learn about various array methods throughout the rest of the lesson. After learning to split strings you see how to access elements in the resulting array. You discover that the same syntax works on strings, further deepening the connection between the two data types. Next, you learn a variety of additional array methods beginning with selecting both single elements and multiple elements at once using array slicing, including a clever technique using negative indices to select the last element in an array. Then you learn how to sort arrays, discovering en route that JavaScript’s default sorting algorithm is less than useful for numerical arrays, an issue addressed in Lesson 5. You also learn how to reverse an array, an ability put to good use later in the tutorial when learning to detect palindromes. Next, you see how to add and remove array elements using push and pop and then learn how to undo a string split with an array join. Finally, you learn how to iterate through arrays using the same kind of for loop covered in Lesson 2, which is valuable preparation for the more advanced techniques covered in Lessons 5 and 6.Lesson 4: Other Native Objects
In Lesson 4 you continue with the tour of some other important JavaScript objects, which gives you a chance to learn about math, dates, regular expressions, and generic objects. Like most programming languages, JavaScript supports a large number of mathematical operations right out of the box, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. It also includes a math library. It also supports more advanced operations like logarithms and trigonometric functions. You also learn how to deal with dates in JavaScript, such as getting the year, the day, or the exact time. This gives you your first chance to use the new function, a so-called constructor function. That is the standard JavaScript way to create a new object. This lesson includes an introduction to the powerful subject of regular expressions, which were discussed briefly in Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous in the context of text editors and the grep command. Often called regexes, regular expressions are a powerful mini language for matching patterns in text. You’ll learn how to use regexes to quickly search strings for things like five digits in a row, thereby matching standard United States ZIP codes. The lesson ends with an introduction to plain objects in JavaScript. We’ll use such objects to create collections of key–value pairs, sometimes known as associative arrays, which are like regular arrays but with strings instead of integers as indices. You apply this important object type to write your first substantial JavaScript program, a shell script to count the unique words in a text.Lesson 5: Functions
In Lesson 5, you learn how to define JavaScript functions, which enables powerful techniques like forEach, which is covered in this lesson, and functional programming, which is the subject of Lesson 6. You begin with a discussion of a couple of equivalent ways to define JavaScript functions, including the more recent fat arrow notation, which can look really confusing if you haven’t seen it before. As part of this, you learn how to sort JavaScript arrays numerically, thereby fixing a blemish encountered in Lesson 3. You begin your study of functions in the read-eval-print loop, that is, the REPL. Then you learn how to put your function definitions in a file for later use. The lesson also covers how to use multiple functions in a row, a technique known as method chaining. You use method chaining to make a first definition of a palindrome function to see if a string is the same forward and backward. The lesson ends with the discussion of the forEach method for iterating through arrays, which often provides a more convenient way of processing array elements than the for loop introduced in Lesson 2.Lesson 6: Functional Programming
Having learned how to define functions and apply them in a couple of different contexts, in Lesson 6 you take your programming to the next level by learning the basics of functional programming. This is a challenging lesson and you may have to watch it a couple of times to absorb everything, but the rewards are rich indeed. The lesson focuses on a triumvirate of functions commonly used in functional programming known as map, filter, and reduce. The first of the examples is the map function, which lets you map a function over an array of elements. It is often a powerful alternative to looping. So far, you have been using a style of coding known as imperative programming, but you see how to use map to take a five-line loop and condense it to a single line. This sort of compression is common in functional programming. The second function covered is filter, which enables you to filter your data based on some boolean criterion. This lets you run through an array and filter out anything that doesn’t match your criterion. For example, you could take an array of integers and filter for only numbers evenly divisible by two, giving us a quick way to select only the even numbers in the array. Our third function is the mighty reduce, which is exactly the kind of powerful technique that can take lots of examples to really sink in but enables us to write remarkably clean and concise code. Because reduce, and indeed all functional techniques, can be challenging to understand even for experienced developers, it’s especially powerful when combined with test-driven development, which is covered in Lesson 8, but first you need to learn how to define objects of your own.Lesson 7: Objects and Prototypes
In Lesson 7 you learn how to make more general versions of JavaScript objects, ones that have both properties, which are data, and methods, which are functions, attached to them. There is a dizzying variety of ways to define objects in JavaScript, but this lesson focuses on one of the most classic ways, which is to use functions, which were first covered in Lesson 5. The result will be an object constructor function that can be used to create or instantiate a new object called an instance using the new method you saw in Lesson 4. This will give you the background needed to understand JavaScript’s object system, which is based on template objects and a prototype chain. If that doesn’t seem perfectly clear, don’t worry, it’s not. Nobody ever understood object systems by hearing definitions like that one. Instead, we look at a series of objects of increasing complexity, enabling you to understand the essence of JavaScript objects by generalizing from concrete examples. In particular, you create a Phrase object that knows whether or not the phrase is a palindrome. You then add a TranslatedPhrase object that overrides the main palindrome method and substitutes a translated phrase instead. Then you use the powerful, even dangerous, practice of modifying native JavaScript objects. This enables you to modify the string prototype itself, giving every string the ability to tell whether or not it is a palindrome.Lesson 8: Testing and Test-Driven Development
Although rarely covered in introductory programming tutorials, automated testing is one of the most important subjects in modern software development. Accordingly, Lesson 8 gives you an introduction to testing in JavaScript, including a first look at test-driven development, or TDD. Test-driven development came up briefly in Lesson 6, which promised that you would use testing techniques to add an important capability to finding palindromes, namely, being able to detect complicated palindromes such as “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama!” or “Madam I’m Adam.” This lesson fulfills that promise. You start by setting up your system for testing using the popular Mocha testing framework. The strategy for testing the current palindrome code and extending it to more complicated phrases is as follows: one, set up your system for automated testing; two, write automated tests for the existing palindrome functionality; three, write a failing test for the enhanced palindrome detector, also known as red (the first step in the TDD cycle known as red-green-refactor); four, write possibly ugly code to get the test passing, also known as green, which is the second step in the cycle; five, refactor the code, which involves changing its form without changing its function. The test suite should remain green even after refactoring, thereby completing the red-green-refactor cycle. As it turns out, learning how to write JavaScript tests will also give you a chance to learn how to create and publish self-contained software packages called NPM modules, another valuable skill for modern JavaScript programming.Lesson 9: Events and DOM Manipulation
In Lesson 9, you return to JavaScript’s native environment and put your newly created Node module to work in the browser, including our first example of manipulating the Document Object Model, or DOM. Specifically, you make a simple single-page JavaScript application that takes in a string from the user and indicates whether or not that string is a palindrome. The approach involves gradually increasing levels of sophistication, starting with a simple “hello world”–style proof of concept. Then you add a prompt/alert design that will motivate the introduction of event listeners. This involves adding a piece of code that waits for a particular event to happen and then responds appropriately. In this case, the listener will wait for a button to be clicked and then prompt the user to enter a string, which will then test to see whether it’s a palindrome. Next, you replace the alert with dynamic HTML inserted on the page itself. Finally, you add an HTML form, which is a more convenient method for entering data than a JavaScript prompt. As part of this, you update the event listener to respond by updating the page itself when the user submits the form, thereby creating a fully functional palindrome detector.Lesson 10: Shell Scripts with Node.js
In Lesson 10, you return to the world of the command line and use Node.js to write three shell scripts of increasing sophistication. This use of JavaScript is currently less common than JavaScript in the browser, but it can be expected to grow as JavaScript, especially via Node and npm, continues to expand past its original web programming niche. These programs also serve as a useful foundation for similar programs written in languages more traditionally thought of as scripting languages, such as Perl, Python, and Ruby. Perhaps surprisingly, you will discover that the Document Object Model manipulation skills developed in Lesson 9 are still useful in shell scripts. Indeed, you extend your capability significantly in exactly the direction needed for the more advanced manipulations used in Lesson 11. The first program in this lesson shows how to use JavaScript to read and process the contents of a file from the file system. The next program then shows how to accomplish the similar feat of reading the contents of a URL. Finally, you write a real-life utility program.Lesson 11: Full Sample App: Image Gallery
In Lesson 11, you apply the techniques from Lessons 9 and 10 to a real, industrial-grade website. In particular, this lesson extends the sample application from Learn Enough HTML, CSS and Layout to Be Dangerous to add a functional image gallery that dynamically changes images, CSS classes, and page text in response to user clicks. The result will be a professional-grade website deployed to the live Web.About Pearson Video Training
Pearson publishes expert-led video tutorials covering a wide selection of technology topics designed to teach you the skills you need to succeed. These professional and personal technology videos feature world-leading author instructors published by your trusted technology brands: Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification, Sams, and Que. Topics include: IT Certification, Network Security, Cisco Technology, Programming, Web Development, Mobile Development, and more. Learn more about Pearson Video training at informit.com/video.

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