Ruby Wizardry

Thank you No Starch Press for sending us this book to review!

After our ten year old finished JavaScript For Kids (highly recommend this book BTW!), our seven year old wanted to try Ruby Wizardry.  Not only is the programming language completely different, the formatting is as well.  This book is laid out like a story with snippets of code and complete ruby scripts woven throughout.

Ruby Wizardry teaches the basics such as variables, symbols, arrays, strings, loops, conditionals, case statements, opening/writing/adding to files,  and more.  The first chapter is dedicated to downloading and configuring the Ruby interpreter to correctly associate .rb files.  

Some of the code will need to be typed beforehand in notepad (or notepad++) and renamed as a .rb file while other bits of code will  need to be executed directly in IRB (command line interpreter).  My son got confused at times and occasionally typed code in the wrong program.

Adult supervision is strongly advised for younger kids to make sure they are "getting it."  Many scripts are playful including a text maze game, a monkey counting script, and a password checker.  Like all programming languages, a single typo can break the whole program.  A second set of eyes may be needed when helping your kids debug their programs.  A computer science degree isn't required to help locate spelling errors and the book's code examples are easy to understand.

If your child is not good at typing, there may be difficulty. You may want to address this before getting started.  Typing code was my son's least favorite part of learning Ruby.  Another disappointment for him was that the programs he made were not graphical and interactive like the snake game his sister made using JavaScript. 

Ruby Wizardy provides a playful introduction to learning Ruby.  While my son may have been too young for it and had the wrong expectations,  a little encouragement went a long way.  Our son felt proud of his accomplishments when the whole family tested his programs.  Make sure your kids like typing and appreciate text-based interactive scripts before buying this book.  It sells on Amazon for $22 which is much cheaper than a college course.  

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