Wikipedia Roulette

In this class you'll write a simple ruby script that pretends to be a web browser, loads up a random wikipedia page, clicks a random link on this page, and repeats until you tell it to stop. Where will your script end up? What mysteries will you discover mining the depths of wikipedia? Think of it as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for websites.

The only requirement for this class is that you have access to a Ruby development environment (if you want to follow along). You should be able to successfully execute the irb command. If you have already followed the RailsSchool installation guide you should be fine.

Programming newbies are welcome, but you'll get more out of the class if you know a little bit of Ruby. Code Academy has some great resources to become familiar with the language.

If you are a veteran programmer but don't know much about Ruby, you'll also enjoy this class. We will go over the basics of using the "net/http" and "nokogiri" libraries for parsing HTML that could be applicable to a variety of projects, including test automation, building web crawlers, and various kinds of screen scraping.