Sept 17: Ruby Newbie Night (Bring a Friend Night)

Gray Herter — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 10:04:00 -0500

Bring your Ruby Newbie friends to the Sept NovaRUG meeting, where we will hold a Ruby Newbie night to introduce new folks to the Ruby universe.

The meeting will be held Wednesday, Sept 17th at the FGM headquarters from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. Pizza and soft drinks will be provided starting at 6:30. The presentations will start at 7 PM.

The meeting will be sponsored by EclipseWorld , who has graciously offered to let us give out a pass to their upcoming conference (Oct 28-30 at the Hyatt Reston) at our meeting. They also have $200 discounts available to us, just use the code, NOVARUG2 when registering.

The speakers will be a mix of folks who have all offered to provide brief introductions to various Ruby related topics. The speakers include Russ Olsen and Gray Herter of FGM, Keith Bennett of Bennett Business Solutions, and Dave Bock and Arild Shirazi of CodeSherpas (and maybe you, too, if you want to join us with a topic).

The meeting will not be a Ruby class, but rather a brief introduction to several of the main features of the language, along with some demonstrations and testimonials on the usefulness of Ruby. The meeting will be informal with questions and tangents welcomed.

We will start with an introduction to Ruby basics up to the point of creating a class in Ruby given by Russ Olsen. Then Gray Herter will provide an short introduction to container objects in Ruby (arrays and hashes), plus regular expression handling, and ranges. Arild Shirazi will explain Ruby blocks, iterators, procs and lambdas. Dave Bock will demonstrate some dynamic Ruby. And Keith Bennett will wrap it up with an explanation of what he loves about Ruby.

Additional topics are welcomed if you want to propose one. It doesn't have to be strictly about the Ruby language. Any short topic that you think might pique the interest of someone curious about Ruby is fair game. If you want to give a short intro to RSpec or rake, or whatever, just let us know. But remember that each presentation should be limited to what can be covered comfortable in 10 minutes or so (we only have 2 hours!), so think 'lightning talk'. Explaining Rails is out, too big a subject! But maybe showing an example of Rails scaffolding could work (Hey Look, just one command and you get FOUR web pages!). You decide and we will listen.

And don't forget to bring your Ruby Newbie friends.

Here is the address:

FGM, Inc.
12021 Sunset Hills Road
Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
Ph.: Call 703.728.5012 (Xandy) or 703.727.1307 (Gray) and someone will let you in to the building

Directions

NovaRUG: Sept 17: Ruby Newbie Night (Bring a Friend Night)

Sept 17: Ruby Newbie Night (Bring a Friend Night)