My apologies for not posting for a few weeks on this topic! I imagine that those of you who followed the last post on tools to get started with have completed those three resources and are very ready to move on.

Next on the list is learn ruby the hard way. This tutorial is great and you can get it free, online. I recommend working through it. This will take you a while and probably, at some point in the middle, you will lose steam and not want to do the rest of the lessons. BUT continue and push through it. Take notes. Do ALL the extra credit. Keep all your exercises in a folder. It gives you a really solid step by step guide to ruby that is a little more advanced than the last group of links I provided. It also provided me with a lot of good questions to ask more seasoned developers to get more information on how certain things worked or what certain things were.

If you’d like to simultaneously be reading a book while doing this, I recommend Chris Pines "Learn to program". To be honest, I didn’t read this book but have since skimmed through most of it. This will give you a good foundational background in programming. Now, this is the stuff that may get tedious and may seem boring (I know I had a really difficult time keeping motivated and focused through this part.) It is so annoying when you just want to build cool things but you just don’t know enough yet to build awesomeness. Don’t worry, the awesomeness is coming!!! But you’ve gotta make it through this first.

Next, do Ruby Monk. I did Ruby Monk way too late, but once I did it, it clarified a lot of definitions and parts of Ruby for me once I did it.

Additionally, start listening to podcasts and figuring out which resources you like. I really enjoy Ruby Rogues, especially their picks at the end but there are a lot of different podcasts, both free and for a low-cost.

Finally, I wanted to toss out two additional resources that aren’t necessarily tutorials. This is an awesome resource: http://iwanttolearnruby.com. It lists a lot of different tutorials and resources, notes the level and cost (if any). It’s a good place to find a lot of the resources I’ve mentioned and more. And last, this article came out this week and I thought it was a really great read with some good messages and thoughts to keep in mind about what she wishes people had told her when she started learning to code. https://medium.com/learning-to-code/565fc9dcb329

Keep going!!