I'm going off on a 7-day Caribbean cruise with the family, and Wifi will cost an arm and a leg.

I've been hacking on an iOS (native ObjC) app with a Rails backend in my spare time for a while. Even with quite a bit of experience, I find that it's easy to get roadblocked working on these things without the Internet due to:

  * need to search StackOverflow for how to do something in Cocoa/ObjC
  * need to download a new gem/pod
  * my app uses some APIs to get data

With that in mind, I'm looking for a new project/language that has a mature set of offline resources such that I can download everything I need and be self contained on my machine for a week.

To me, that means the following requirements, but I haven't thought super hard about them:

  * Complete, readable documentation downloadable and accessible offline
  * Well-written downloadable tutorial/ebook with solutions/sample code
  * No dependencies on downloaded modules, etc.
  * Can make meaningful progress with 10-14 hours across 7 days

Some of my interests:

  * Android development (I know C but not Java) or a cross-platform mobile framework
  * data visualization (d3js)
  * R (have dabbled for about a dozen hours)
  * coding competitions
  * Kaggle (only lurked so far)
  * Javascript (I use jquery; just hack things together right now)

I recently learned sed and awk from simple tutorials, and I think those kinds of things are definitely in scope. Not sure what other Unix tools I've been missing out on, though.

Without a lot of justification, I'm not so interested in things like node.js, Go, Scala, etc. because I can't think of much use for them. I'm an Analytics guy professionally, not an engineer.

Would appreciate any ideas!

user:	wwwhatcrack
created:	July 2, 2014
karma:	-15