It was certainly full of people who are dipping their toes into Ruby. After a quick introduction about Coding Grace and the person the organisation is named after, Grace Hopper, we went straight into writing their first Ruby script.

After some initial setups and wee setbacks from the local Wi-Fi (or lack of), everyone was set up with Ruby set up and exercise files to work on afterwards.

There workshop went pretty swiftly covering numbers, text, variables, Booleans, flow control, arrays, hashes to writing one’s own Ruby piece of code and experimenting by running it.

After running through the slides with everyone trying out scripts in their irb, people grouped up to go through exercises together.

Ruby workshop setup and exercise files: http://bit.ly/cg-ruby-feb14

A few things that I noted from the workshop from questions asked:

• tryruby.org: Try out Ruby commands in your browser
• ruby-lang.org/en/documentation: Ruby documentation
• sublimetext.com: Sublime Tex Editor (Recommended)
• Sorting characters in Ruby. Uppercase letters come before lowercase letters.
  - http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/String.html#method-i-3C-3D-3E
  - http://www.evc-cit.info/cit020/beginning-programming/chp_07/custom_sort.html

Also how we refer to symbols used in Ruby (and most coding languages)

• [ or ] - Square brackets
• ( or ) - Parenthesis 
• { or } - Curly brackets or braces
• ! - Not

Basic command lines:

• ls (Linux) or dir (for windows)- List contents in the directory  
• cd name_of_dir - Change directory to name_of_dir

Here’s a handy cheatsheet for *nix commands when you use command line in your chosen terminal/console.

If you want to attempt the exercises and lost the files, you can find them here:  http://bit.ly/cg-ruby-feb14

Here are some upcoming workshops and events:

• Intro to Python Part 3 - Sat 22nd (11:00-16:00)
• Python & Visualisation - Tue 25th (18:30-21:00)
• Intermediate HTML5/CSS - Sat 8th Mar (International Women’s Day)
• Intro to Processing - Sat 15th Mar
• Ebon Upton, creator of Raspberry Pi talk at Science Gallery (not Coding Grace) - Thu 3rd April
• Raspberry Pi Workshop at Science Gallery (not Coding Grace)- Sat 5th April

I would like to thank the mentors, Elaine, Shane, Andrei and Shane (and Mick) for come along to run the workshop.

A big thanks to Pulse College for hosting our workshop.

And one final big thank you to all those who came along on Wednesday evening, please let me know if you want an advanced Ruby workshop, or a Ruby on Rails workshop, etc.

I’ve storified the day as well.