| FORPC101-3: 3rd Batch Graduates - Jan. to Mar. 2008 |
| Al Snow |
U.S.A. |
After learning about Ruby at 2006 NFJS conference, I bought books, subscribed to Ruby/Rails podcasts, and attended Atlanta Ruby user group, but did not spend much time learning or using the language. When I saw the course announcement this January (2008), I knew the structure of a class would help me, so I signed up immediately. This is much more than a course - this is a "open-source" community of sharing regular training material/exercises/quizzes and of contributing to each other learning through blogs, wikis, forums, and emails. As an example, in addition to read the material and doing the exercises and course project, I have contributed through exercise solutions, course ideas, unit tests, and external references (i.e., Google Summer of Code, 99 Problems Solutions). I have really enjoyed it and invite everyone to come and join our growing Ruby community in learning and sharing. |
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| Alexei Shilin |
Russian Federation |
This was my first experience with online programming courses. I started to learn Ruby before I heard about rubylearning.org, but for me it was a problem to start from the beginning and have all the basic concepts and technics of the language lined up and grasped in a nice sequence of lessons. To cover up everything I needed some external motivation - this course made me do it, and I am happy now because I have a better understanding of the whole picture of the Ruby programming language. This will help me in the future. Participants and Satish Talim as the host were really responsive and gave me a hand when I was struggling with some misunderstandings or would stumble against issues I could not fully grasp. That is the strongest side of this course - helpful and friendly community. My colleagues made me feel very comfortable here and showed me one more time that learning and coding in Ruby _is_ fun! And the more fun it is, the more productive you are and everyone is happy. |
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| Cihan Inan |
Turkey |
This course was "the chance of my life with programming languages." I have tried to learn Ruby before this course, but that way it was hard for me. In this course, when I solved a given exercise, I was also able to read other people's programs and that helped me improve my code. If you are a beginner in Ruby, this course is the best way to improve yourself. I want to thank you, Satish Talim, for this wonderful course and your immense patience with us. Also I want to thank the assistant teachers for pointing out the problems in our code and helping us write better Ruby code. |
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| David Foard |
U.S.A. |
I just wanted to thank you for teaching the Ruby course. I learned a lot, plus the course spurred me to do a lot of extra reading and branching off on my own. My real work load caught up with me about 3 weeks ago, so I had to reduce my time spent on Ruby. However, I now use Ruby whenever I want to tackle a new problem, that I would have done in other languages (VB.Net or Cache). For example, I am a big fantasy sports fan and help run a league. Every year, we create new team divisions which has been a manual, time consuming process. However, with Ruby, I was able to write code that will automate this process so that it only take a few minutes tops to input the parameters and then seconds to generate the teams for each division. |
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| Fran Diéguez Souto |
Spain |
I liked this course because: (a) I could see the code of other programmers (b) I could improve my knowledge of Ruby (c) I had regular exercices to do (d) The publicly accessible theory note were concise and helpful. Thank you Mr. Talim and the people who partiticated in this course. |
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| José Carlos Monteiro |
Portugal |
I've learned Pascal, C, LISP, C++, Java and other languages while I was at the University. When I started working I had to learn - on the job training - Delphi, and from then on I realized that most programming languages are more or less easy to learn if one invests time and has a book or some source of information to get started. This way I’ve learned Perl, PHP, PL/SQL and a small set of others. But in doing so I never really felt that I had properly learned about each one. And I was afraid that the same thing would happen to me while learning by following online books, articles and other references. Until... until I stumbled on a link that pointed out to a Free Online Course for Ruby. Being online was a major advantage for me, due to time constraints, and being free was a plus since money is short and my company only invests in "well-known" languages. The first 2 to 3 weeks, after the course started, I was mostly on "reading-mode" in the forums and was satisfied to accomplish the exercises and quiz. Until, due to some discussion in a thread, I realized that I had to participate more, and more often, in the forums. By doing so then suddenly, easily, almost without realizing I started to feel that I’m really learning how to code in Ruby. And that what I learn makes sense even when applied in other scenarios instead of being just a huge pile of "glued blocks of code". It's code that I can re-use, that I understand - probably more than in other languages - and that is fun. That is indeed a major advantage of Ruby: coding is fun! And as Marcos and others have mentioned: this course is about participation and sharing, to which I add "discuss" as well. One final word to thank Satish, for his dedication, efforts and commitment in the success of this online course and to thank the community of participants, from teachers to students (which is growing and I'm so glad to be a part of it). |
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| Jose Mendoza |
Brazil |
I am very happy and satisfied to have taken your Free Online Ruby programming course. This course helped me get a grasp on Ruby. The course is very interesting and I would recommend the same very strongly. |
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| Matheus Ricardo Uihara Zingarelli |
Brazil |
This course not only taught me how to code in Ruby but also taught me how to ENJOY the art of coding. Our professor, Satish Talim, helped us every time we needed help, gave us links, reading material, fast answers in the forums and so much more. Talking about the forums, they were the best part for me: lots of people, different experiences, doing the same course, sharing code and comments, having fun, helping others... it was really, really good! I recommend the course for everyone! You'll have a great time there! |
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| Odracir Antunes Jr. |
Brazil |
I would like to thank you very much! "The Free Online Ruby Programming Course" and the "Free Study Notes on Ruby" helped me a lot. I think that your book/course is very well designed and complete. The chapters sequence/content was arranged in a very didactic way. Short texts merged with simple examples clearly explain the concepts in each lesson. The exercices point to key concepts, and help the learning process a lot. In my opinion, your ebook is a "must-read" for anyone who wants to learn Ruby. Congratulations! |
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| Paulo Henrique Mendes de Souza |
Brazil |
I never trusted these online courses and thought they could never be as good and as comprehensive as normal presencial courses. But since these are generally very expensive, I found Satish's free online course and signed up for a test. By the end of the fourth week I had already changed my mind completely. The course is totally serious and I have learned a lot, even more than if it was presencial. Satish is a great teacher and always helped me when I needed. I'm sure that any person who enrolls for the new batches will learn as much as (or more than) I did. |
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| Pawel Radecki |
Poland |
The Free Online Ruby Programming Course, gave me a fantastic opportunity to revise the theory and try it in practice. |
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| Pedro B. Costa Neves |
Brazil |
Well, I really enjoyed the progress of the course. These 3 months of learning was really appreciated, I thought it would be much more difficult to learn Ruby, but with the help of the asst. teachers at the forums and the help of Satish course and exercises, it was quite easy. I will subscribe to the next batch as I know that the course becomes better with each new batch, as new and better things are added. To everyone who participated, a big hug. |
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| Renato Candido |
Brazil |
The collaborative work existed long before the Internet was created but its creation was responsible for increasing interaction amongst people very distant from each other. Free software came from it. Among free software, we have Ruby and Ruby on Rails. This course reflects exactly this ideology: Collaborative work. I'm new to Ruby and the course was a very good start to this amazing language. The studying notes, the discussion forums, the exercises, the teacher's work and specially the students, make this a very good place for learning the language basics and new programming techniques through collaborative work. I'd like to thank Satish for this resource. |
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| Satoshi Asakawa |
Japan |
"This Free Online Ruby Programming Course" is the world's best way to learn Ruby programming and English at the same time. If you'll jump into this small Ruby community, I promise that you will improve your Ruby and English ability and get many friends from all over the world too. Ruby is a magic word. Let's enjoy Ruby programming! |
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| Tim Leonard |
U.S.A. |
I took this course as a refresher since I have not written a program in several years. The course provides good coverage of the main points of the Ruby language along with lots of excellent examples. Thanks for all of your time and efforts. |
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| Victor Brylew |
Ukraine |
There so many ways to learn new programming language and I have tried online courses in the begining of this year. In this course, since there are a many participants asking questions related to the language and programming practices, any participant can get all s/he needs to know. On the other hand, each participant has the wonderful opportunity of comparing various styles of programming. Styles are not only set by functions used but the number of code lines, complexity and the commenting way. You can find all this information in books but only during collaboration will you be able to compare because usually books contain only one variant of problem solving. Therefore if you want to find your own way in this language then this course will be great for you. |
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| Willian Molinari |
Brazil |
I am very happy of my knowledge of Ruby, after I underwent your Ruby course! The course that Satish provided us is simply fantastic and I had a lot of fun learning Ruby along with hundreds of other participants. I feel that the best way to learn Ruby programming is to take this Free Online course provided by Satish. Congratulations! |
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| William Nelson |
Sweden |
I am glad for having had this opportunity to study Ruby with Satish and so many other outstanding programmers. Their collective input has given me many insights that I would never have garnered simply from reading Ruby books (which I now have done). As a beginner (both with Ruby and programming), I knew that the road to learning would be a steep upward climb...but it has been leveled considerably by the format and structure of this course, and mostly by reading the forum discussions! What wonderful, lively and engaging discussions of the coding world of Ruby. I am glad I learned enough Ruby to appreciate these discussions and hopefully in the near future my Ruby prowess will allow me to contribute as well... I think the learning revolution via Internet is starting to gather momentum and Satish is definitely pioneering this movement with his engaging Ruby learning courses. Many thanks and I now, thanks to this course, have Ruby running in my veins...and hopefully pumping life into my programming attempts to put Ruby to work in the information dense world of the life sciences. Many thanks for a wonderful learning experience! |
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