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Ruby Ruby Foundations Methods Instance Methods

Posted by Harrison Hondo
Harrison Hondo
7,283 Points

Do I need to switch operating systems?

To this point i have been following along in the command prompt on a windows 8 computer. I have been wondering if it is suggested for me to switch to a linux/unbuntu operating system because I have noticed some inconsistencies between the different ones.

I just had to manually create the sublime file because there are no "touch" and "subl" commands on windows. I am currently stuck on the step wear Jason runs the simple_methods.rb program with the command "ruby simple_methods.rb". The file contains the code

def hello

puts "Hello world"

end

hello

and it returns him with Hello World in the command prompt.

You may be able to answer the 2nd part of my question but I am more concerned about the first part because I have already had to ask a question on this video because of my OS and I am worried that this problem will persist throughout the course.

1 Answer

William Li
PLUS
William Li
Courses Plus Student 26,868 Points
William Li
William Li
Courses Plus Student 26,868 Points

Let me first say that I use all 3 major OS on a daily basis, and I am not a Windows hater. However, my answer to your question is probably "YES". and here's why:

  1. most, if not all Treehouse lectures are taught using an OS X / Linux, even though the new courses rolling out now give you a chance to use Workspace and write code in the browser, a lot of Treehouse's older courses don't use Workspace. the OS inconsistency you just found out now is just a tip of the of the iceberg, you'll just keep finding out more and more of them in the future, as a someone who wanna learn web development, you wanna focus on learning, not spending time finding solution to deal with the OS inconsistency.
  2. Installing an Ubuntu on Virtual Machine is very quick and easy these days, so why not just give it a try.
  3. Knowledge of Linux (particularly its command line) is extremely valuable for web developer, especially when you need to admin your website hosted on VPS or AWS.
  4. this is the most important reason. OS X / Linux are OS of choice for most web developers. As a result, Windows has been treated as 2nd class citizen by the web community, pretty much all of tools, libraries, frameworks are designed to run on OS X/Linux, and chances are either they don't bother supporting Windows at all, or their Windows release is months behind. For example, when Rails and Node.js first come out, it's unix only; and Meteor still has no official Windows support.