Updated Ruby Tutorial

Friday, August 17th, 2007

I’ve just updated my Ruby tutorial with a ton of new content. Some of the added sections include:

  • A regular expression (regex) reference
  • An explanation of the rather confusing rules behind block scope
  • An example on the use of the Ruby case statement (similar to the C switch statement)
  • How to write your own attr_accessor method (and understand class_eval in the process)
  • Several new core functions and methods

I don’t know if anyone else is finding my reference helpful, but it has definitely aided me in understanding the intricacies of Ruby.

Ruby – A Lightning Tutorial

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Whenever I’m learning a new programming language, I find it helpful to keep notes on what I learn. Ruby is no exception, except this is the first time I have tried compiling these notes into more of a tutorial.

You can see the first draft of it (or the Alpha version), over here.

Its style is based on the assumption that you can always find out about the practical usage of the language, its classes, functions, and methods, later. Lightning Tutorials (yes, I intend to write more) attempt to teach only the absolute essential parts of the language, its syntax, idioms, features, and gotchas. Because they do not explain anything but the most fundamental parts of the language, they can be very concise. However, you must already be a relatively competent programmer to understand them. I don’t explain what terms such as “instance variables” or “classes” mean, as they are not intended to be an introduction to programming, but rather a quickstart guide for experienced programmers who wish to get up and running on a new language quickly. After all, you can always read the language docs later.

Updated, Finally!

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

In case you hadn’t noticed, I finally updated my blog to use the current version of wordpress, along with a new theme I created. Now that I’ve updated, its probably safe to say that before I was running wordpress v 2.0.4 (which is about 6 months out of date). Thank goodness no-one tried to hack my site!

I’m going to attempt to be posting more regularly now, as one of the main reasons I didn’t post before (or my excuse at any rate) was that I needed to update this blog before I used it.

I hope to publish a review of my experience with Mac thus far in a few days, although I need to get some tournaments up and running first.

Feel free to comment on any parts of the new design you love or loathe 😉

PHP Markdown

Monday, August 14th, 2006

I have recently become increasingly annoyed with the WYSIWYG editor included with WordPress, at least its current version. Due to various problems it makes it practically impossible to type escaped html markup into a post, which is utterly unacceptable for my needs.

I have however, found I much better solution – PHP Markdown. PHP Markdown disables all the annoying WP auto paragraph functions for plain text editing, and adds its own special plain text markup system which is very similar to that of MediaWiki. It also offers extremely easy code insertion/escaping by simply inserting back-ticks (`) inside of a paragraph, or indenting a line four spaces outside of one.

You can also create headings as easy as

# This makes a heading 1

One other plus is that it does not seem to break past posts that used pure HTML, so you can safely activate it on a blog without utterly destroying all your old posts.

So far I am very pleased with it, and I probably won’t switch to a WYSIWYG editor again anytime soon.

Site Moved Completely to WordPress

Wednesday, August 9th, 2006

I have just completed moving this site completely over to WordPress as the CMS. I wanted a clean start so I only copied over certain blog postings from the old site, and all the old comments (all 3 of them) are gone. I intend to do some pretty massive updating of the content soon as well.