Prep for coding bootcamp (Part 2)
Tadaaaaa… You preparation for coding bootcamp starts now!
As I have said in the last article, my main focus will be on Ruby since that is the programming language my coding bootcamp of choice is teaching.
First, check out Launch School prep course on this link here.
It’s completely free, except from Chris Pine’s book that they are suggesting, although you can probably find that too online for free if you do a bit of Googling ;).
I won’t go into every detail of their prep course, I will only add certain material that I have found useful elsewhere and what I believe you can skip (to be honest not a lot, tough work is ahead of you).
If you don’t know much about Git and you won’t if you started to learn coding from scratch like I did then roceed to codeacademy and do their learn git course which is very short and easy.
As far as command line is concerned efw simple commands like touch cd ls rm will be enough for start.
And now to Ruby…
Chris Pine book — super fun and easy and…then you get to chapter 9. WTF happened?!? Cute and fluffy dog has just turned into big bad wolf and you want to run away from it as quickly as possible. That’s at least how I felt when I first saw it. Fortunately, these two chapters are not that important for you as beginner so you can skip them, and that’s pretty much all that we are skipping, sorry folks.
After you finish Introduction to Programming book and Ruby Basic Exercises you will be done with the LS prep but not with mine.
My add-ons :
Finish Ruby Primer course on RubyMonk.
This course is pretty basic, but so is your knowledge of Ruby at the moment. You can skip sections about Blocks, Object Oriented Programming and Modules, you don’t need them for now.
Watch this Launch School video series. It is great for beginners and if you are anything like me, watching videos is a lot more fun then reading books.
Join codewars and solve 150+ katas.
It’s a great site, completely free btw, where you can practice your language of choice by doing some simple, and many, not so simple code problems. Each problem is ranked from 8 Kye (easy) to 1 Kye (very hard).
Start by doing 8 Kye problems only. Move on to next Kye if you find most of the problems in current Kye so easy that you do them in few minutes without much thought.
If you can’t figure out hot to solve simple problems (from 8 and 7 Kye) in 15 minutes forfeit and check solutions. For lower Kyes try for at least 30 minutes before forfeiting.
After you finish the problem, whether you solve it or forfeit, best solutions from users will be shown to you. Those will usually be fancy one liners with methods that you won’t understand a bit. And now comes the important part…Go to Ruby docs and check how the methods work. If Ruby docs are unclear to you, Google these methods since someone has certainly asked the similar question before. Make sure you get how the method(s) work before moving to the final and most important part which is…you need to remember that solution and redo the problem by typing this solution from memory. Doing this over 100 times will turn you into coding beast!
One final thing, and I should have mentioned this before…
Learn in circular fashion.
What this means is that when you finish a book, video, blog post, whatever, plan to return to it later. Let‘s say that you have finished all the material that I have suggested and you still don’t get certain concepts completely. Hashes, for example, can be bit*h. Go back and reread chapter about Hashes in Chris Pine’s book, then in Introduction to Programming, then in RubyMonk course. Each time you reread about it, you will get one “A-HA” moment until you finally get it. And that is the whole point of learning something, to understand it and to be able to apply it in practice.
Hopefully you are well prepared for the coding bootcamp by now…next time, I will talk about my experience so far in Launch School.
