Note: This guide is intended for the 9/20/2012 ONA practical programming class and is a work in progress. Feel free to add comments or visit the Github repo. Follow me at @dancow for updates.
This primer to practical programming is designed for an Online News Association class that I’ll be teaching on Sept. 20. If you’re planning to attend ONA in San Francisco and are interested in this class, sign up here.
This is currently a skeleton draft, published only as a preview. Check out the table of contents to see the proposed lesson path.
The lesson plan is intended for absolute beginners. The few libraries and programs used in it can be run on any major operating system.
We will be using Ruby. But the concepts here apply the same to any other high-level programming language.
The author of the currently committed lesson is Dan Nguyen, a developer and journalist in Manhattan. He is a news application developer at ProPublica and the incoming Head of Data at Skift.