Tuesdays from 6:30 to 9:00pm

6 sessions: February 21 and 28, March 6, 13, 20, and 27. 2012 

This class is designed for people with programming experience in another language, or who have been introduced to Ruby through Rails and want to learn more Ruby.

We will focus on learning the Ruby language through exploratory development and test-first teaching. Weekly homework assignments will provide hands-on reinforcement of concepts on a regular basis. We will dive into Objects and Classes, cover Arrays, Hashes, Strings, Numbers, and Regular Expressions, and learn about Ruby's memory models. After the language and syntax common patterns, you will learn how to do practical things like call the twitter API and print the results of a search. 

You will receive the book The Well-Grounded Rubyist by David Black, which will supplement the class instruction. 

About the instructor: Alex Chaffee is a hardcore coder, teacher, and a prolific contributor to a variety of open source tools and frameworks. At Pivotal Labs, he led the development of Pivotal Tracker, a popular project management application written in Ruby and JavaScript. He is also regarded as one of the Bay Area's leading Extreme Programming coaches. In addition to his many software development accomplishments, he has published research papers on evolutionary computation (aka 'genetic algorithms') and implicit memory in human cognition.