The problem: Programming is too hard and filled with too many technical details.

The solution: First learn why programming relates to your goals and ideas. Then learn programming.

The problem: How to gather and analyze U.S. Congressmembers tweets

The solution: Use programming to avoid tedious, mind-numbing data-entry

The problem: What do we use to write code?

The solution: We’ll learn how to access our systems’ command line and install one of the free and excellent text editors ideal for writing code.

The problem: How do we install Ruby and run Ruby programs?

The solution: With Google, StackOverflow, and a little patience.

The problem: How do we even put URLs into our programs?

The solution: Use the String class to represent text characters.

The problem: The URLs all share common patterns. How do we combine these together?

The solution: Strings can be added to other strings. But not all types of data can be combined together.

The problem: How do we tell numbers and strings apart?

The solution: Use the dot operator to access methods and attributes of data objects.

The problem: Adding strings together with plus signs is annoying and hard to read.

The solution: Use the File.join method, which assembles a filename string from multiple strings

The problem: A lot of the text we’re using is repeated over and over.

The solution: Use variables to store data for later reference in our programs.

The problem: How do we actually download files off the Internet?

The solution: The HTTParty gem provides methods to easily download from URLs.

The problem: How do we deal with JSON data files?

The solution: Use Ruby’s JSON library

The problem: How does Ruby represent the data found for a Twitter account?

The solution: The Hash is a data object that lets us access the attributes contained in the Twitter data.

The problem: How do we work with the JSON for a page of tweets?

The solution: Because a page of tweets can contain many tweets, they are stored as arrays

The problem: How to read from hundreds of tweets without writing hundreds of commands.

The solution: Use a loop to repeat commands as many times as we need.

The problem: We want to get tweets from more than one Congressmember

The solution: Use another loop to read from a list of Congressmembers.

The problem: We want to find the Congressmember with the most followers.

The solution: Use the if statement to add logic to your program.

The problem: All these simple steps are adding up to many lines of intimidating code.

The solution: Wrap up routines into a method call.

The problem: We’re writing too much boilerplate code over and over.

The solution: Move the code into a separate text file and begin using our text-editor.

The problem: We’re having trouble understanding the code we’re reusing.

The solution: Wrap these routines in easy-to-read method calls.

The problem: How do we loop through all the tweet pages on the local drive?

The solution: Change our get_data_file method to check for file existence.

The problem: The data source just up and changed its location!

The solution: Thanks to how we abstracted and organized our code, we need modify just a few details to adapt.

The problem: How to read data from a spreadsheet-like file, such as CSV?

The solution: Use the FasterCSV library and Hash objects to simplify reading the datafile.

The problem: How can easily collect just one attribute from a collection of Twitter account info or tweets?

The solution: Use collection methods to transform collections to a particular value

The problem: How do I filter for just the Congressmembers of a given state? Or above a certain age?

The solution: Use a collection’s select method.

The problem: My coworkers want to work with the data but none of them can read JSON

The solution: Just loop and transform the data objects into anything you want, including strings.

The problem: How does Twitter activity correlate with age and political prominence?

The solution: Use methods and logic to filter on any attribute you’re interested in.

The problem: Who uses proper English when tweeting?

The solution: Use simple text-pattern matching to filter tweets by content.

The problem: The short-links used by Twitter obscure the actual website URLs.

The solution: Let’s build our own dataset of short-links and their destinations.

The problem: How do we publish our findings for the Web?

The solution: Creating data-backed webpages is just more loops and methods.

The problem: How do we make interactive webpages?

The solution: First, learn about HTML and Javascript. Then, break down your data-processing tasks like before.

The problem:

The solution: