day_1

Day 1 - Strings and Numbers

Today, you will begin to learn the basics of Ruby. You will work through several tutorials which will help build your comfort running files and seeing output. You will also learn about two ways to represent data in Ruby: Strings and Numbers.

In addition to learning Ruby basics, this day will also walk you through entering commands in the terminal to create files. By the end of the day, you should be very comfortable with the commands cd and ls, both very useful in navigating your machine, and the commands mkdir and touch, used to create directories and files on the machine.

After completing the days work, you will use several git commands to save your work to your local git repository. You will then push your updates to your remote Github repository. Doing this each day will help you build muscle memory with git commands and get used to seeing the output they produce. We will dive deeper into the inner workings of git later. For now, most important is to follow along and know that we are using git to save our work, and Github to put it on the internet.

This lesson will have you using Git, Github, etc. Here's a video walkthrough

Open your local copy of backend_mod_1_prework in Atom

Using your terminal, open the local copy of this repo. To do this, enter these commands into your terminal:

cd ~
ls
cd turing
ls
cd 0module
ls
cd backend_mod_1_prework
ls
cd day_1
ls
atom .

This will open the day_1 directory in Atom. You should be able to see the directory and its contents in the file explorer on the left side of your Atom window.

An Introduction to Ruby

Read This Introduction to the Learn Ruby The Hard Way Tutorial. To reiterate this introduction, DO NOT copy and paste code examples when working through lessons in your prework. Actually type each of them out.

Ruby Basics Lessons

1. Next, you will complete several lessons from the Learn Ruby the Hard Way Tutorial. For each lesson follow these directions closely:

   1. Create a file within your day_1 directory that will contain this lesson's work. Verify that you are within the directory by using terminal command pwd. If you are not, cd into your day_1 directory. Once you are there, use the touch command in your terminal to create a file. For the first lesson, name this file ex1.rb. For each subsequent lesson, use ex2.rb, ex3.rb, so on, so forth. Refer to back to day_0 if you need a refresher on terminal commands.

   2. Work through the lesson, typing the code into your file, and running it in the terminal with ruby ex1.rb, replacing ex1 with the actual file name of what you'd like to run. Make sure the output you get is similar to what the lesson shows. If you get an error saying "No such file or directory", be sure to verify the directory you are located in via the terminal- running command ls should show the file you are trying to run.

   3. Complete the Study Drills listed at the end of the lesson.

   4. Read the Common Student Questions section.

2. Check off the items below as you complete the steps you just read for each lesson. Remember to create a file containing your work for each lesson!

   • A Good First Program

   • Comments in Code

   • Numbers and Math

   • Variables and Names

   • Strings

   • More Strings

   • Asking for Input

   • Have you created 7 ex.rb files with your code in them?

3. Work through the Strings and Numbers sections from Ruby in 100 Minutes. For each of these sections, open an irb session by typing irb into your terminal and type in the code snippets provided.

Exercises

• Each day contains an exercises directory containing files where you will practice writing code.

Work through the files in the day_1/exercises directory. Complete them in this order:

1. strings
2. numbers
3. variables
4. interpolation
5. loops

Questions

• Each day contains a questions.md file where you will answer questions about what you have learned.

Answer the day 1 questions within the questions.md file. The .md file extension refers to markdown formatting. Markdown is a simple markup language to help format your text. This article shows everything you need for basic markdown formatting.

Save your work in Git

When you are finished with all of the day_1 activities, follow these steps in order to save your work to your local git repository.

1. Make sure you are in your day_1 directory. Enter ls in your terminal- You should see the exercises directory, README.md, and questions.md all listed.

2. In your terminal, enter git status. You should see output like this:

   On branch master
   Changes not staged for commit:
     (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
     (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
   
     modified:   exercises/interpolation.rb
     modified:   exercises/loops.rb
     modified:   exercises/numbers.rb
     modified:   exercises/strings.rb
     modified:   exercises/variables.rb
     modified:   questions.md
   
   Untracked files:
     (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
   
     ex1.rb
     ex2.rb
     ex3.rb
     ex4.rb
     ex5.rb
     ex6.rb
     ex7.rb
   
   no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
   

   The command git status shows us information about files we changed. Don't worry too much about understanding what this all means just yet. What's important is that you get comfortable typing git status often.

3. Enter git add ex1.rb.

4. Enter git status. Your status should now look a little different:

   Changes to be committed:
     (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
   
     new file:   ex1.rb
   
   Changes not staged for commit:
     (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
     (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
   
     modified:   exercises/interpolation.rb
     modified:   exercises/loops.rb
     modified:   exercises/numbers.rb
     modified:   exercises/strings.rb
     modified:   exercises/variables.rb
     modified:   questions.md
   
   Untracked files:
     (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
   
     ex2.rb
     ex3.rb
     ex4.rb
     ex5.rb
     ex6.rb
     ex7.rb
   

   Under "Changes to be committed", "ex1.rb" is now listed. This means that git is now prepared to save this file. We want to do this for each file that has been modified.

5. Enter git add ex2.rb

6. Enter git status. "ex2.rb" should now be listed under "Changes to be committed".

7. Do this for each of the "ex#.rb" files you created and for the "questions.md" file.

8. Enter git status. Under "Changes not staged for commit", you should see all the files in the exercises directory.

9. Enter git add exercises.

10. Enter git status. You should now see all those exercises files listed under "Changes to be committed". We just used git add <directory_name> to add all the files located in a directory.

11. Enter git status. You should now see all your files listed under "Changes to be committed". If there are any files listed under "Untracked files" or "Changes not staged for commit", add them using git add <file_name>.

12. Enter git commit -m "Add day 1". Don't forget to close the quotes of your message!

13. Run git status. You should see this output:

On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Congratulations! You just saved your work to Git! If git status is showing any files, add them with git add <file_name> and commit them with git commit -m "Add day 1".

Push to Github

You've saved your work to git on your local machine, but it is not yet accessible through your remote Github repository. Updating our remote Github repository with our local changes is called pushing. Push your code with the following command:

git push origin master

You should see output similar to this:

Counting objects: 9, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (8/8), done.
Writing objects: 100% (9/9), 1.03 KiB | 1.03 MiB/s, done.
Total 9 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 1 local object.
To github.com:JohnDoe/backend_mod_1_prework.git
   e8ebd7a..32c0ed3  master -> master

You should now be able to log in to GitHub, navigate to your remote prework repository and see all the work you did today!