A memo when passing Ruby Silver with one official textbook

What is Ruby Silver?

This is a type of Ruby engineer certification exam. The official name is Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer Silver version 2.1： It is abbreviated as Ruby Silver.

The time limit is 90 minutes and 50 multiple-choice questions will be asked. Answers are answered by operating a PC at a test center of a company called Prometric nationwide.

The levels of Silver are as follows.

Certified to have a basic technical level of Ruby grammar knowledge, Ruby classes and objects, and standard library knowledge. (From Official Site)

Exam history

75 points is the pass line. As shown below, I got 84 points in the first time and passed successfully!

Situation at the time of the exam

It has been about half a year since I joined a company developed in-house as a new graduate.

Originally from an information university, he mainly uses Python when he was a student. I had little experience with object-oriented languages such as Ruby and java, and I started taking the exam when I joined the company and started developing with Rails.

When I was worried because there were many things I didn't understand, my senior engineer told me that there is an exam for Ruby Silver, so I remember applying for ** that night **.

Teaching materials

I used only one Official Text. (It's a little expensive because it costs 3000 yen or more, but it can also be used as a reference, so it's worth having it.)

Study goal

You will be able to solve the problems contained in the official text perfectly

The official text contains basic ability confirmation questions (30 questions) and mock questions (50 questions). In the exam, these 80 questions will be asked with similar intentions or exactly the same questions.

As an aside, setting specific goals is important when studying for an exam. The goal of "passing" is too abstract. I feel uneasy until just before the exam, so I set a specific action goal of "OK if I can do this by the exam". If you do, you either have the wrong goal setting or you couldn't reach the goal.

How to study

Please read the outline of the exam at the beginning, such as the time limit and answering method, in advance. The basic cycle is as follows.

0, Create a memorization sheet (A4 paper, etc.) 1, solve the problem suddenly 2, Read the problem explanation and write the items to remember on the memorization sheet → If you are not sure, check the operation with irb 3, Read the explanation and read the detailed page of the knowledge you thought you needed, and add it to the memorization sheet 4, Check the wrong problem Solve all 80 questions recorded by repeating 5, 1-4 6, memorize the memorization sheet 7, Solve the problem with a check mark, and if you can solve it, add a circle next to the check mark, and if you make a mistake, add a check mark. 8, Solve the problem of the check mark without ○ Solve 9, 80 questions over and over again 10, Just before the test, just look at the memorization sheet

(For those who can afford it) If you can afford the exam with 80 official text questions being perfect no matter how many laps you do, solve the following official mock questions (50 questions). https://gist.github.com/sean2121/945035ef2341f0c39bf40762cd8531e0

The important thing is to solve all 80 questions recorded ** first **. Reading hundreds of pages of text from the beginning never ends, and it's very inefficient to randomly remember a huge amount of methods and their return values.

You can solve the problem first, identify the missing knowledge, and then go to the details page. Often the commentary is sufficient.

I think it is uneasy to study with just one textbook. However, it is more dangerous to deal with various problems on the WEB in a half-finished state.

The tendency of this exam is clear, so if you can answer 80 questions exactly, I feel that the passing line is okay. Get used to the how problems are raised.

For example, try solving the following problem.

What happens to the following output?

a="ruby silver"
a.upcase #Method to capitalize the alphabet
"HELLO" + " " + a

puts a #=>

The correct answer is " ruby silver ". It is not " HELLO RUBY SILVER ". (I got caught at first) ʻThe upcasemethod is a non-destructive method, so the receiver (the caller of the method) itself does not change. Most destructive methods have!, But be careful because some methods such as concat that join arrays are destructive methods without! ( Concat` comes out very much).

What happens to the following output?

a="ruby silver" #=> "ruby silver"
a.upcase #=> "RUBY SILVER"
"HELLO" + " " + a #=> "HELLO RUBY SILVER"

puts a #=> "ruby silver"(The contents of a have not changed)

As you can see, even if you study hard and know how to handle the ʻupcase` method, it is different whether you can answer the problem correctly.

Summary

It is very important that you have a complete understanding of the official text questions (80 questions in total)