Dinarius is more visited than ever before and now doubles its weekly average of visitors from just two months ago to more than 400. Our Traffic Rank has rocketted up to put Dinarius in the top 1% (considering an old story of there being 100,000,000 sites worth visiting) of all websites based on USA visits. I attribute this to the Web 2.0 “work” I did several weeks ago and made a long GoodMP3 about recently. So why have I been MIA lately?

I’m learning the Ruby Programming language with help from books, tutorials and online manuals and the official http://api.rubyonrails.com site. It’s hard enough to keep me moving slowly but easy enough for me to have built, http://www.rewbies.com which is a site that will cater to Ruby Newbies. Knowing HTML and CSS have helped somewhat, but knowing JAVA and C++ and PHP command would have helped more.

I came across an interesting article that states that learning in PAIRS is a good idea (pair programming) and SmallTalk programmers with years of experience might be best to buddy up with. Source. Somewhere else, Obie (Italian btw) hints that knowing how to build complex mechanisms in Rails isn’t quite like knowing real programming.

He didn’t say this as a bash on newbies, but as a word of caution to new Ruby and Rail users: Learn the basis [sic.] (I think he was thinking ‘basics’) before you call yourself a programmer in Ruby. I just have a quick comment in order that I shield myself from any Ruby bashing from other program camps. While Ruby is one of the leasat-adopted programming languages despite its brilliant track-record (Rails was developed by BaseCamp to work with Ruby), some readers might interperet Obie’s post as a negative light on Ruby and Rails bolstering their opinion that Ruby on Rails is too new to be a real programming language.

This is just odd. Although I don’t know Latin, I am goodly at the newer language it fathered, English. I’ve almost completed the second part of my Ruby 1.8.6 Rails 2.0 tutorial, PhotoSlip and all the receipts from the books I bought to learn from are dated less than two-and-a-half weeks ago. Ruby and Rails seem to me to be natural progressions of programming languages. They’re more natural, they’re almost written in code that is human-readable and the learning curve is so gentle that it’s no wonder programmers in other languages are miffed.

Learn it. Follow Obie’s advice, pair up. Grab a SmallTalker if you can and, if you’re a persistent newbie as I am (always learning), then give http://www.rewbies.com a hollar if you wish. As the days go by, more content will appear on that site and free me up to author the normal odd Things Geeks Should Know here at Dinarius. Thanks sincerely for all your visits and loyalty.