Class presentation created for “Learn to Program (Vivid Summer)” on 9/2/2010.

The IO class is the basis for all input and output in Ruby

IO objects represent readable and/or writable connections to disk files, keyboards and screens – even to Strings

Here is a running collection of links about useful articles I may want to reference later. In no particular order.

Rubymine productivity tips or full reference. In particular:

What’s a trie?

A trie is a “prefix tree” for binary searching. You know how google-suggest starts coming up with results even before you’ve finished typing? That’s trie-based logic. But before I get into the what, let me get to the why.

An introduction to my blog

I have just implemented and deployed this “scanty” blog to heroku. Scanty was put together by Adam Wiggins and the code is available on github. Scanty is very minimal; it is written with Sinatra uses SQLite relies on the Syntax ruby gem for code snippets, Disqus for comments (and comment spam handling), as well as other tidbits that Adam blogs about. BTW, he also has a version of scanty that uses redis. In his blog about scanty-redis Adam argues that this in-memory key:value store offers good line-count optimization; I stuck with the SQLite version because I’m more familiar with an old-school DB (a one table DB at that).