TreeHouse Ruby Operators, Control Structures, and Collections by Jason Seifer Course Review

I decided to finish the Ruby track on TreeHouse before I continued on with Rails.  While I have worked with Ruby for quite some time, there is still much of it that I need to relearn, refresh, or learn for the first time.  While I had approached much of this material before, I definitely did needed the refresher.  I come to this review as someone who has completed Code Academy's Ruby course, worked through Chris Pine's Learning to Program, and having completed about a third of Zed Shaw's Ruby the Hard Way book.

When I saw Seifer staring me down I had some reservations.  Last time I saw this man he was speed racing through the Rails tutorial and was a major player in the coding crisis that ensued after I "halfpleted" the course.  By halfpleted I mean that I worked through it but conceded that I was essentially lost for the whole second half which i the worst case scenario of online tutorials and a scenario that played itself out many times when I worked through Code Academy.

Fortunately, my fears were unfounded.  The speed-racing alien that replaced kindly Jason Seifer seems to have left his body.  This was the friendly and kindly fellow who taught me Ruby Basics!  He moved slowly and I was easily able to follow along in Workspaces without excessive video pausing.  Generally speaking, these courses reminded me of why I subscribed to TreeHouse in the first place.  It features a nice combination of quizzes, coding, and videos.  The videos are succinct and it is not torturous to watch quite a few of them in one sitting.

These courses do a fine job of covering arrays, hashes, and programming branching in Ruby and I came away with a stronger knowledge of these subjects and was closer to mastery than before.  There is also a really nice exercise during which you have to build a grocery list.  The exercise is difficult where I had to look up some of the tough parts but not so tough where I felt lost and hopeless.

These two courses are pretty quick and accomplish their aims without much difficulty.  I did not feel like I was just doing it for the points or clicking through as I had with Rails.  They are perfectly paced and offer enough complexity to get you thinking and provide a solid foundation as we move forward.  Next up, I take on loops which has been a topic I have a basic understanding of but certainly need more practice on.

Resources in Progress:
Total hours into Programming: 111 (3 since last time )
Days into Programming/Hours per day: 2.5 Hours Per Day (Goal:3.0)

Progress on Gaddis' Starting out with Python: Done With Chapter 1, Appendix A,B

Progress on Shaw's Learning Ruby the Hard Way: Finished Exercise 1-13

My Text game: 3 hours, 118 lines

TreeHouse (3437 Points, 40 Badges)

Code Academy Points: (752 points, 78 badges)

Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 

Resources Finished:
Josh Kemp's No Degree, No Problem 8/14/2015

Chris Pine's Learn to Program 8/9/2015

TreeHouse Make a Website Track 8/17/2015

TreeHouse Ruby Basics 8/20/2015
TreeHouse JavaScript Basics 8/22/2015
TreeHouse Console Foundations 8/24/2015 
TreeHouse Git Basics 8/25/2015
TreeHouse Installing a Ruby Environment 8/26/2015
TreeHouse Making a ToDo Rails App 8/31/15
TreeHouse Ruby Logical Operators 9/4/2015
TreeHouse Ruby Collections 9/5/2015

Code Academy Make a Website Course 7/29/2015

Code Academy Ruby Course 8/5/2015

Code Academy HTML and CSS Course 8/24/2015