Over the past month or so I have been doing a lot of work on the Oracle Tool from my previous post. I totally redesigned the tool and turned it into a major player which I will have finished some time this month. I have decided that I want to learn at least one new programming language each year. Since 2008 was a year for Java to start with and then slam home C# with ADO.net I need something new and different for 2009. I looked at a few languages including Perl and Javascript. Now is the time to make the decision - and the choice is....
Ruby (Gems, Rails, etc).
Why Ruby? Well it is an old language with a new twist (Rails) and is becoming more popular. Plus it's not Windows proprietary. I am not anti-Microsoft by any means - Bill Gates has put many a dollar in my household over the years. My goal is to become as well rounded a programmer as possible. This to me means variety across multiple language types, platforms, OS's, etc.
So now that I have my language set - what development environment to use? I asked a couple of people who have programmed in Ruby and their preferences were Linux and Mac. Well I don't own a MAC and haven't used Linux in over a year. So linux it is :o). I chose Ubuntu 8.1.0 Desktop for this. I like Ubuntu and it has great reviews from others.
To start with I setup a virtual machine with Ubuntu on my desktop here at home. This beast is a quad core, 8 gigs of ram - more than a TB worth of space (raided) so I am good on resources. I am primarily Windows based so I don't have the heart yet to convert my main machine to Linux just yet. Well the setup went well and I was suprised at how many of the command line commands I had remembered, and forgotten :o). After setting up / updating / and configuring the OS I installed my development tools. I choose to install NetBeans 6.5 as well as Eclipse. Both are good IDE's and Netbeans has great interaction with Ruby. I also added MySQL which I haven't used in a few years. I will be using SubVersion for my source control and even found a nice little script on the net (haven't tested yet so I am not posting yet) that will backup you repositories, zip them, and copy them out to another drive.
Note: I haven't chosen a plain text editor as of yet - not sure which I am going to use but will determine in the next few weeks.
So now that my VM is setup to develop I am going to spend the next few months getting into Ruby / Linux / MySQL and some web development. This will keep my interest for a while at home as I continue to improve my C# skills at work.
I'm so excited - I can't wait to build my first app. Oh wait - I have to go away for a family vacation this weekend so it's going to be a few extra days :o|.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment