It all starts with Ruby Jumpstart. If you’re looking for your first introduction to Jumpstart Lab courses and programming in general, this is the course for you. You’ll jump right in and create real, useful projects. But, at the same time, you’ll build a solid foundation to build upon when you pursue our Rails and Facebook courses.

Levels Offered

• Level 1 An introduction to Ruby, data structures, flow control, conditions, basic I/O, and manipulating data
  • Sample Projects:
    • Parse Excel Spreadsheets / Comma-Separated Values (CSVs) and edit data
    • Generate unique and random passwords for a list of users
    • Send out customized Direct Messages to a list of users on Twitter
    • Plot a list of addresses on a Google Map
    • Lookup Congressional district data via a web-based API
  • Skills:
    • Understanding how a computer program works and how execution flows
    • Basics of objects, methods, parameters, and return values
    • Use of data structures including variables, hashes, and arrays
    • Use of flow control techniques including looping and branching
    • Principles of basic logic including equal, not equal, NOT, AND, and OR
    • Use of conditional logic including IF, ELSE, UNLESS, and ELSIF
    • Accept input and deliver output data through the console and comma-separated value files (spreadsheets)
    • How to load and access available Ruby libraries and gems
• Level 2 Designing multi-object systems, advanced flow control, interacting with external systems with the following skills:
  • Splitting logical processes into multiple methods and objects
  • Extending core classes with custom methods
  • Dealing with complex parameters and return values

Upcoming Sessions

• Ruby Jumpstart – Level 1: 4/17-4/18/10

• Ruby Jumpstart – Level 1: 6/26-6/27/10