Some people can’t just sit and do nothing, I know that cause I’m one of them… I call these people: *NOP people. Even a ride on the elevator is just enough time to check emails and tweeter, and that’s also why I always need a side project. Last year I committed to PHP and MySQL (LAMP), even though I read some awful things about it, I decided to learn some PHP because there are so many CMSs built with LAMP:WordPress, Drupal, Joomla… and carts as well: Magento, Zen cart, Open cart…

For year 2013 I decided to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. For those of you who don’t know the difference, it’s simple:

Ruby – scripting language that has many cool features such as dynamic typing (also known as “duck typing”)

Ruby on Rails – web framework for Ruby that provides many libraries that’ll make your life much easier. RoR, like Ruby, is provided free and is open source.

I have to admit that until the end of February I thought that Python will be the winner but then I ran into Rubymonk and it just caught me. In parallel to Rubymonk, I re-solved about 30 challenges in codeeval – because of the first rule of programming: you can’t learn a new language just by reading!

When I started coding in Ruby, I was looking for a good IDE for Mac and after some Googling work I decided on Sublime Text Editor. It takes a little time getting used to it, but when you learn shortcuts like command+R – jump to another function, or, command + P – to browse between files, and the very convenient tab completion (ife, tab for if-else-end for example) and many other shortcuts which you can browse yourself by typing command + shift + P. God bless sublimeText!

I didn’t take any of the in from Try Ruby but I bet that they’re good, and I can say that because I took a few classes in Rails for Zombies and it was fun! I would definitely check out the other classes in codeschool.

On my next NOP of course..

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*NOP – In computer science, NOP or NOOP (short for No Operation) is an assembly language instruction, sequence of computer programming language statements, or computer protocol command that effectively does nothing at all. (from wiki)