Programming workflow

In order to do programming excercises on your computer, play around with things you learned, and write actual, useful programs you want to learn the following workflow:

• Write some code in your text editor.
• Save the code to a file in a particular directory. The filename should end with .rb.
• Open your terminal.
• Navigate to that directory using cd.
• Execute the file using ruby.
• Switch back and forth between the text editor and terminal, so you can make small changes in your code, and then run it through ruby to see what it does.

In order to switch back and forth between apps quickly you can use the keyboard shortcut cmd-tab on Mac OSX, and alt-tab on Ubuntu and Windows.

In your shell you can use the cursor up key to go through your last used commands: you don’t have to type ruby hello.rb again. Just hit cursor up and then enter to run it again.