Ruby Code Kata

ruby-talk
1

I’m getting together a bunch of people with varying degrees of Ruby
experience to write some code in something like a “developer’s camp” or
"xp immersion" style of event. Some people know Ruby really well. I
imagine some people will download the windows installer a few days
before and won’t know much.

People will learn Ruby by pairing with other people. But I figure we
could spend part of the first day doing some practice exercises, kind
of to warm up. We’d want to focus on special features of Ruby, ones
that Java/C#/C++ programmers wouldn’t necessary have ever experienced:

  • extending build-in classes
  • singleton objects
  • blocks
  • messages (1.send("+", 2) and the like)
  • context (how is instance_eval different from class_eval from eval?)
  • eval, for that matter.

I’m thinking of something along the lines of Dave’s code kata:
http://pragprog.com/pragdave/Practices/Kata
But focused on Ruby. That is, concrete exercises - “do this (to learn
about that)”

Any suggestions? Thanks.

···

Brian Marick
Consulting, training, contracting, and research
Focused on the intersection of testing, programming, and design
marick@testing.com, marick@visibleworkings.com
www.testing.com, www.visibleworkings.com

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2

In article 09E889B0-7F16-11D7-8C84-0003939BC6F4@testing.com,

I’m getting together a bunch of people with varying degrees of Ruby
experience to write some code in something like a “developer’s camp” or
“xp immersion” style of event. Some people know Ruby really well. I
imagine some people will download the windows installer a few days
before and won’t know much.

People will learn Ruby by pairing with other people. But I figure we
could spend part of the first day doing some practice exercises, kind
of to warm up. We’d want to focus on special features of Ruby, ones
that Java/C#/C++ programmers wouldn’t necessary have ever experienced:

  • extending build-in classes
  • singleton objects
  • blocks
  • messages (1.send(“+”, 2) and the like)
  • context (how is instance_eval different from class_eval from eval?)
  • eval, for that matter.

I’m thinking of something along the lines of Dave’s code kata:
http://pragprog.com/pragdave/Practices/Kata
But focused on Ruby. That is, concrete exercises - “do this (to learn
about that)”

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Brian,

Interesting idea. Where are you planning on doing this?

Since you seem to indicate that everyone will know Ruby at some level,
it would be good to pair more experienced Ruby programmers with less
experienced ones. And I would suggest that perhaps the goal of the camp
should be to actually develop some useful/needed Ruby module that can be
put up on the RAA.

Phil

···

Brian Marick marick@testing.com wrote: