DEV Community: Edouble79

Blog Post 13 Understanding Strings, Arrays, and Hash in Ruby

Edouble79 — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 18:47:21 +0000

As I continued to take a step back to understand Ruby more I came across Strings, Arrays, and Hash. Sometimes I feel I have to simplify the terminology for me to understand and grasp the programming language better.

To me the term String refers to basic piece of data. It may contain letters, numbers, or even symbols. An example of this can be, "I love Ruby" or 'I love Ruby'. Strings can be done by using single or double quotes as mentioned earlier.

What is an Array? It is like a container or even structure that can store multiple values. What does that even mean? Here is an example that I used using my family members.

family = Array["Esme", "Aria", "Crystal"]

The container/structure in that code above is family and the names of my family members are the array elements.

Lastly a Hash is like a collection of unique things to a specific value. What does that even mean right? It almost acts like an array where we store pieces of information but with a Hash you can store something called key value pair. We can store a value and give it a key which is kind of like giving it a name. For instance, using a dictionary we have a word and then the definition. So the word is the "key" and the "value" would be the definition.

At first I did not understand it so I had to read and watch videos to dumb it down for me. Here is an example that helped me understand it.

states = {
"Illinois" => "IL",
"Puerto Rico" => "SJ"
}

Here we have the states in "key" form and the value would be the abbreviated states in two letters. The => symbols serve as a "map" to link the "key"/state in to the "value"/letters on the right. Seeing this multiple times has helped me understand how it works. Now applying it in a real job setting....only time will tell.

Blog post 12 Compound & Complex Conditions

Edouble79 — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:10:46 +0000

In today's blog, I decided with the help of my mentor Gino, I needed to go back to understanding Ruby a bit more because I was having a very difficult time with Ruby on Rails. Sometimes you have to take a step back...

The learning goals for this specific lesson I was working on were as follows,

Explore the Truth Table & the Precedence
Practice expressing & evaluating complex conditions
Practice making parse trees

The truth table was easy to understand in the ADA curriculum because of an example they gave. I flipped that using my own experience in Djing. If I need to dj at an event I would need my turntables and mixer. This is an && (and) example. Understanding the truth table and precedence is like understanding what goes in order as far as executing a math equation, well that is how I try to comprehend.

I have learned that operations that have a higher precedence in the operations are evaluated before the operations with the lower precedence. This list from highest to lowest in precedence form helped in understanding how this operates.

```true && true # => true and true is true
true && false # => true and false is false
false && true # => false and true is false
false && false # => false and false is false

true || true # => true or true is true
true || false # => true or false is true
false || true # => false or true is true
false || false # => false or false is false```

Blog Post 11 Anatomy of routes.rb

Edouble79 — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 15:42:22 +0000

Hello all! Since my last blog I have been digging deep into understanding Rails using VScode. The language seemed familiar from Ruby when I took the lessons at CodeCademy.

A couple of things I have learned in Rails is R.E.S.T. and GET.
Understanding the connection of the Request method and Path on how they make up the first half of a Rails route. The second part/half is the route action, the Ruby class and method that will take care of the incoming request.

Rails.application.routes.draw do # verb 'path', to: 'controller#action' get '/books', to: 'books#index' end

I was able to break down the code by understanding that the verb was "GET", the 'path' was '/books', and the controller#action was the 'books#index' line. This code reminded me of the Ruby language I was learning in Codecademy and I was able to remember it but also apply it in a new curriculum I am learning with Rails.

Blog Post #10

Edouble79 — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 16:05:04 +0000

It has been a few weeks since I have made a post on my learning. So far I have received a couple of certificates in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I still believed I have a lot to learn.

The pic below has helped me to understand the structure especially when I was creating my web page with my mentor Gino. For those that are starting out and are completely lost like I was late in 2021 this will be greatly in how HTML works.

Blog Post #9

Edouble79 — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 14:41:56 +0000

It has been a while but my learning continues. I am starting to see how front-end, back-end, and Full Stack Developer all tie in. Gino has me currently learning a curriculum from Ada-Developers Academy, an app called SoloLearn, and continuing working on my github site.

The app has helped me in understanding what goes in HTML index file compared to a CSS.index file. For example, in a HTML.index file, that is where I would structure the content that would appear on a website such as images, texts, and videos. On the CSS side, that would be considered the styling to the site and presentation which would be colors, layout, and fonts.

I forgot to mention that the book Gino gave me, "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley has been great and I am currently on chapter 11.

Blog Post 8: Learning Journey Week of 11/8/2021

Edouble79 — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 14:24:57 +0000

Another week went by with my journey into learning Coding, Ruby, HTML, and CSS. I feel that as everyday passes, I am able to understand this new world that I have submerged myself into.

Another learning tool that my mentor Gino has given me was advice on how to approach learning with a book by Barbara Oakley titled "A Mind for Numbers." I rarely read but Gino encouraged me to read the book and understand how learning takes different shapes and sizes. I am currently in chapter 5 and it is going great.

Gino had me download an app called SoloCode and that has been a great help in understanding how HTML and CSS worked together when I created github.io page in VSCode. There are fill in the blanks when taking the lessons on the app as well as short quizzes that I am confident in saying I have passed them all!

Blog Post 7: Learning Journey Week of 11/1/2021

Edouble79 — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 15:13:59 +0000

Week November 1st-5th 2021 was interesting because for the first time ever during this journey into Software Engineering. I kind of saw the vision or felt the vision Gino(mentor) was trying to show me. Gino suggested I invest in note cards to remember certain vocabulary,codes, and steps.

In the beginning of the week Gino had me read several articles/curriculums on program fundamentals. Here is quick glance into what topics I read here (https://github.com/Ada-Developers-Academy/textbook-curriculum/tree/main/00-programming-fundamentals).

While reading the curriculum I noticed that almost everything I saw was what Gino has been teaching all along! For example, the proper steps in to push changes in GitHub Gino has been stressing to me how important it was and is. I used one of my note cards for that. Also I ran into a merge conflict issue with Gino in regards to some information I was updating in my about me page from my GitHub.io site. In a weird way I was excited that I ran into this issue because I had the opportunity to see how the issue should be resolved in order to move forward in GitHub.

Blog Post 6: Learning Week of 10/25/2021

Edouble79 — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 19:07:44 +0000

Another week of Ruby went better than last week. This week(October 25-29th) was great, I honestly felt I was finally understanding the jargon as they say. In my lesson of Ruby, Object Oriented Programming 1 and 2 was great for my understanding. The syntax below was easy to use.

class ClassName
  def method_name(parameter)
    @class_variable = parameter
  end
end

The reason why I choose this syntax is because I am now confident in how to breakdown what I am looking at...somewhat.

When I look at that syntax above I first noticed that there is a class that we define as ClassName followed by the method that will be defined as method_name, we then need a parameter that will go into the parenthesis. Once we have our parameter we then can assign it to equal to the variable which is why we see @class_variable = parameter.

In the example below dog was used to insert in the ClassName section. We then created a method to initialize within the class of Dog.

After we use the initialize method, we insert two parameters, name and breed.

Inside that initialize method we can now assign those two parameters to the variables @name and @breed respectively

class Dog
  def initialize(name, breed)
  @name = name
  @breed = breed
  end
end

Another thing I wanted to add that Gino(Mentor) would ALWAYS remind me is that whenever you have a class, make sure to include end when the code is complete but ALSO when defining a method you have to add end for that as well which is why we see not one but two "end"s on the bottom of this particular code.

Again, I may have not have the correct jargon or terminology but this is coming from a 42 year old that is in the process of switching careers from Teaching to this. So far I am enjoying it and learning at my own pace.

Blog Post #5:Learning Week of 10/18/2021

Edouble79 — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 17:12:32 +0000

Hello everyone, week of October 18-22 was ups and downs. Tears, tears, and more tears because I was still having trouble with the coding language in Ruby(Codecademy) and how it applies in real life. As a former CPS teacher I had tools to use in class whether it was classroom management, how to speak, how to facilitate and how to execute the curriculum to my students. In this IT world I am having a difficult time learning what first_prisms, Blocks, Procs, Lambdas mean. Interpolation was another one!

Towards the end of the week I began another lesson called "Object-Oriented Programming" which was interesting and fun. Here's a syntax I learned in Ruby that describes @ symbol before a variable to signify that it is an instance variable.

class Person
  def initialize(name)
    @name = name
  end
end
matz = Person.new("Yukihiro")

Another syntax I learned was that the attributes in a parameter correspond to what makes up a vehicle, see example below.

class Car  
  def initialize(make, model)
    @make = make
    @model = model
  end
end
Kitt = Car.new("Pontiac", "Trans Am")

Blog Post #4

Edouble79 — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 15:43:54 +0000

Week of October 11th-15th-I had a chance to start the week off with "The Zen of Ruby" which ran about 20 lessons/exercises that included the following, Ternary Conditional Expressions, Case Languages, .updownto & .downto methods, Concatenations, Implicit Returns. Again it was another week where I was trying to understand the language, syntax and overall exercise. Sometimes I find myself asking, "how do people do it with coding and language of understanding?" I saw a bit of improvement in understanding how to replace + and << with .to_s for non string values. What I value is time and patience...which is what I have in understanding this.

Blog post #3

Edouble79 — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 15:34:50 +0000

Week of October 4th saw me dive deeper into Ruby with accessing Hash Values, Iterating over Multidimensional Arrays, Iterating over a Hash, Creating a Histogram, Creating Frequencies, Sorting the Hash, Methods of Blocks & Sorting, Parameters & Arguments, Splat Arguments, How Blocks differ from Methods. What I enjoy about CodeCademy is how you can type in the editor and see if the code is successful or if I need additional assistance I can click on the hint section to give me a bit of a review in terms of what syntaxes and examples I may use to execute the code.

Blog post #2

Edouble79 — Mon, 18 Oct 2021 15:28:10 +0000

Week of September 27th-October 2nd was frustrating for me. I started out with Loops & Iterations and Infinite Loops. There was an example like this:

i = 0
loop do
i += 1
print "#{i}"
break if i > 5
end
This particular syntax was a bit difficult to understand because of the language, I am trying to get use to.

I also learned about Redacting, .Split method, Control Flow, and data structures.

As my Mentor Gino says, "Relax Erik and take a break, then come back to it." I am trying.