If you’ve ever been interested in learning to program in the Ruby language or just programming in general, I would highly suggest you check this site out.
Hackety Hack is a downloadable, interactive tutorial and programming environment. You can edit and save your Ruby programs, you can also share them with other “hackers” and you can download other peoples’ shared “hacks” as well.
There is a built-in tutorial section of the program that runs on the top in another window while you enter your code in the editor portion of the program. The tutorials are easy and powerful, you create a blog using only six lines of code in the second lesson.
It is for beginners and seasoned programmers alike. They should have more of these for other programming languages and license them out to schools and universities. This would have been great when I was in school, I would have loved it. So go to www.hacketyhack.net and get it for yourself.
If you want to get a little more in depth into Ruby you can check out www.ruby-lang.org (It’s official!) or you can read _why’s (poignant) guide to ruby which is by the creator of Hackety Hack and it is just as fun to read and full of cartoon fox comic strips. I must have read like five chapters at work today, it’s great.
P.S. Ruby is the basis for the Ruby on Rails web framework which is all the rage right now. That is the main reason I wanted to learn it. Go check it out too www.rubyonrails.org.