Learning Ruby With Ruby Koans

I’m learning Ruby these days and after reading the excellent book The Ruby Programming Language I found myself in need of actually writing and reading some code. I tried starting a pet project in Ruby but the, uhm, distractions of two young children made it difficult to get that off the ground and I also quickly realized that I needed some more training before I could get productive on that project.

So enter Ruby Koans written by Jim Weirich and Joe O’Brien of EdgeCase. This little git repo guides (and forces you) through a series of test files with (at first) failing unit tests where you read code and make failing tests pass one after another. It starts out easy with variables and true false and the likes and end up with open classes, message passing and modules.

If you tolerate some zen puns and need a quick intro to ruby and testing in ruby, it’s worth a look. The beauty for me was the ease of doing one pomodoro of Ruby Koans each morning and the mental context needed to do that was very small.