Anyone any where near the Learn environment knows that it heavily uses test driven development (through rspec) to verify progress. This is great - everyone can efficiently work through the labs independently and get the same feedback.
The CLI Data Gem Project requires scraping an external web site and providing access to the data through a command line interface. For my project, I chose the Christian Science Monitor(CSM) news site - https://www.csmonitor.com/. This CLI gem presents a list of story titles. If a story is selected, a story summary is displayed with URL to full article. Yes - this is a little lame! Why use a CLI to get a URL and view story in browser? Why not just browse the right page? But anyway, we’ll go with the project as a learning experience.
Ruby’s attribute accessor macro’s provide a simple succinct way to define getter/setter methods for instance variables. Anyone coming from some other programming languages knows the tediousness of creating getter/setters and the inevitable typo’s to be found and corrected. So I’ll have to call this one of Ruby’s contributions to improving the quality of life for programmers.
Though its been a very long time, I remember some of my first coding experiences in school – the process of solving the puzzle, the sense of accomplishment when it all worked, and then recognizing the beauty of an eloquent solution. (right – I said beauty when talking about a program!)