Exercise 1: A Good First Program

Remember, you should have spent a good amount of time in Exercise 0 learning how to install a text editor, run the text editor, run the Terminal, and work with both of them. If you haven't done that then do not go on. You will not have a good time. This is the only time I'll start an exercise with a warning that you should not skip or get ahead of yourself.

Type the following into a single file named ex1.rb. This is important as Ruby works best with files ending in .rb.

puts "Hello World!"
puts "Hello Again"
puts "I like typing this."
puts "This is fun."
puts 'Yay! Printing.'
puts "I'd much rather you 'not'."
puts 'I "said" do not touch this.'

Then in Terminal run the file by typing:

ruby ex1.rb

If you did it right then you should see the same output I have below. If not, you have done something wrong. No, the computer is not wrong.

What You Should See

$ ruby ex1.rb
Hello World!
Hello Again
I like typing this.
This is fun.
Yay! Printing.
I'd much rather you 'not'.
I "said" do not touch this.
$

You may see the name of your directory before the $ which is fine, but if your output is not exactly the same, find out why and fix it.

If you have an error it will look like this:

ruby ex1.rb
ex1.rb:4: syntax error, unexpected tCONSTANT, expecting $end
puts "This is fun."
          ^

It's important that you can read these since you will be making many of these mistakes. Even I make many of these mistakes. Let's look at this line-by-line.

1. Here we ran our command in the terminal to run the ex1.rb script.
2. Ruby then tells us that the file ex1.rb has an error on line 4.
3. It then prints this line for us.
4. Then it puts a ^ (caret) character to point at where the problem is.
5. Finally, it prints out a "syntax error" and tells us something about what might be the error. Usually these are very cryptic, but if you copy that text into a search engine, you will find someone else who's had that error and you can probably figure out how to fix it.

Extra Credit

You will also have Extra Credit. The Extra Credit contains things you should try to do. If you can't, skip it and come back later.

For this exercise, try these things:

1. Make your script print another line.
2. Make your script print only one of the lines.
3. Put a # (octothorpe) character at the beginning of a line. What did it do? Try to find out what this character does.
4. From now on, I won't explain how each exercise works unless an exercise is different.

Note

An 'octothorpe' is also called a 'pound', 'hash', 'mesh', or any number of names. Pick the one that makes you chill out.