One of the greatest difficulties of learning a new programming language or framework is that you don’t know if you’re doing things the right way. Tutorials and books can only take you so far, then you’re alone; it’s not as easy as it was in school where other people were willing to guide you through the more difficult concepts.

You think “I know there are areas where I could improve, where I could do things in a smarter way, but how?”  Ruby on Rails guides you towards doing the right things with its simplicity and convention over configuration mantra, but what about Ruby, just plain Ruby?

Ruby isn’t perfect, it’s not the easiest language to learn after almost a decade of C/C++ and its cousins Java and C#.  My first Ruby book quickly became obsolete; its code examples illustrate approaches that are out of date, deprecated or just plain wrong.  Suffice to say the pace of Ruby’s development isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So what do you do?

Frustrated, I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be great to see how other people write and use Ruby code? To learn from their technique” Then it hit me like a brick, Unit Testing!  Almost every gem comes with its own unit testing folder.

I must have browsed through every Ruby Gem I have and read the unit tests, not only did I learn new Ruby techniques, I learned more about Unit Testing.  Now, the first thing I do after I download and install a gem is browse over to “C:rubylibrubygems1.8gemsgemnametest” and read the unit tests, there’s no better way to learn Ruby.

I still miss intellisense.

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4. First Meeting: Unit Testing With NUnit