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I learned Ruby and Ruby on Rails much faster than I had any right to, when my new job in NYC required it. I practiced not by writing Ruby on the job, but writing Ruby to scrape Craigslist apartment listings and feeding them into a spreadsheet.

I started teaching myself computer programming in 2011/2012: I bought a bunch of Head First books published by O'Reilly, watched the entry-level CS video lectures that Stanford provided for free, participated in the first few Udacity courses, and I tried a couple Coursera classes. But I think I learned the most (in the shortest amount of time) when I went through your online book, 'The Bastards Book of Ruby'[0]

I loved the real-world examples you used: fetching Tweets through the Twitter API, web scraping with Nokogiri, and manipulating images with ImageMagick/RMagick are a few that stick out to me.

I'm sure you're doing great things at Stanford but I'm also confident that you could come out with a new book (covering the topics you spoke of above) that would help motivate people who are on the fence on whether or not they should start/continue learning computer programming.

I'd be happy to collaborate on something but I would argue that Python would be a better language to use than Ruby. Here are some of the topics I'd like to share with people (which I've found to be useful in my career/side-projects): reading data from CSV/Excel files (xlrd[1]), fetching data from APIs (requests[2]), web scraping (BeautifulSoup[3], Selenium[4]), connecting to a SQL database within a Python script (psycopg[4]), complex mathematical computations (numpy), and downloading videos/metadata from YouTube (youtube-dl[6]) are a few that come to mind.

[0] http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ [1] https://github.com/python-excel/xlrd [2] http://docs.python-requests.org/en/master/ [3] https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ [4] http://selenium-python.readthedocs.io/ [5] http://initd.org/psycopg/ [6] http://www.numpy.org/ [7] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

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