Preface

Read this book at your own pace, and do exercises at your own pace.

We recommend reading at least a page a day (ideally more), and taking some more time, at least once a week, in addition to the weekly meeting on Mondays. It often helps to meet with others, have some coffee and cake, and hang out while reading some more of this book, or doing a few exercises together.

We suggest that you read the book from beginning to end, and do exercises as you go. If you come across chapters that you feel are too theoretical you can skip them for the time being and come back to them later, if needed.

If you’d prefer to jump right in, you can also skip over the introductory chapters. Jump to the chapter “Your tools”, and read the introductory chapters later. If you already feel familiar with your editor and terminal, and know how to use ruby to execute a Ruby file, then you can skip over the chapter “Your tools”, too.

Take notes about whatever questions come up during the week, things that you don’t understand, and everything else worth mentioning (for example, epiphanies you have, or things you found interesting). Bring your notes to the study group so we can talk about them in the group.

Please help us improve this book for others: Whenever you find something unclear or missing then please tell us. You can do this during the study group, email the mailing list, or ideally file an issue here. (This also helps you get familiar with GitHub, which we will use a lot later on.)

By using the name “Ada” in examples in this book we give credit to Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer :)

Resources

We also recommend looking at, reading, and working through other resources, as much as you can. Every beginners book expresses things a little bit differently, in a different order, and from a different angle.

Overview

Recommended reading

Online courses

Puzzles

Role model stories

Resources for coaches