Instructions

A guide to understanding the formatting used in the curriculum.

Important concepts

important concepts or terminology are in bold.

Exercises and activities

Instructions for you to do something (an activity or exercise) look like this:

• An instruction for you

Activity examples

Activities are usually followed by a guide as to how I'd do it:

There's usually some code to execute in here. You can't generally copy-paste it though.

Extensions or tangents

If something isn't directly related, but might be interesting, provide context, or more information, it'll be in a blockquote (like this).

Code blocks: interactive and non-interactive

There are two kinds of code examples in this curriculum. In some of them, you can play with the Ruby code in-browser. These look like this:

1 + 1

You can and should play with the interactive code samples. Try changing one number to another, or one sign around, or adding extra things. Each time, try to develop a picture of what's happening in the program world when you make changes.

Another kind of code example is non-interactive. They look like this:

$> irb
 >

In these code examples, I'll include the IRB prompt as a chevron ('>'). You don't need to enter the chevron into your IRB. If I'm typing in the console (Terminal), rather than in IRB, I'll include the prompt as a dollar-chevron $>. Again, you don't need to enter the dollar-chevron into the console.

Each line of the interactive code examples can be typed into IRB as a separate instruction. In Ruby, generally speaking, a newline (↵) means 'execute this instruction'. IRB allows you to send line-by-line instructions: interactive examples allow you to queue up instructions to send one after the other.

When I want to illustrate something but I don't want the code to be executed, I'll put a hashtag (#) in front of the code:

# This line of code will not be executed.

Have fun! Head to the first chapter