Saturday, February 15, 2014

Week 2 Day 5: Data - Making and Scraping

Major activities of the day: Morning assignment to put together a School model, lecture about use of databases in Ruby (very exciting to put together databases and Ruby - interactions between tools are super cool, and this allows you to let objects persists across runs of the program!), and a group assignment to scrape our student profiles from the website using the Nokogiri gem.  Nokogiri is fantastic; I'm just starting to learn its power, and I already love it.  Among other things, it lets you take a website and select bits of it using CSS selectors.  So for example, I can look at all the parts that are links within a particular type of element (div, figcaption, whatever) or have a certain class or ID.

Weekend homework was putting together a model of Artist, Genre, and Song where each class relates to the other two.  'Twas fun.

Skills developed: Combining SQLite3 with Ruby, web scraping with Nokogiri

QOTD: "Yes, I'm afraid chartreuse is one of my favorite colors... No, I'm not going to change it just because it's not your favorite..." - Larry Wall, creator of PERL, on his website's background color, see http://wall.org/~larry/

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