Reach your Ruby Zen

The Ruby community is full of great resources to learn the specifics of the language. One small tool I regularly return to and recommend to all junior devs looking to discover Ruby is Ruby Koans.

A Koan, in Zen philosophy, is an exchange between a master and their disciple that helps the disciple progress toward enlightenment, Zen. This GitHub project offers the same, in Ruby.

You just need to download the repository locally (either from the webpage or GitHub) and read the README. It invites you to run a test suite, which will fail on the first test. At each step, you must understand the issue and fix the test. Once the test is corrected, a message will congratulate you on your progress toward enlightenment when you rerun the suite, which will then stop at the next test—your next step.

The journey is divided into chapters covering Arrays, Blocks, Hashes, Classes, Constants, Regular Expressions, the Nil class… You’ll often be surprised by what you find.

The value of this program is in learning by doing—writing code. It’s rewarding and fun.

Even as a senior developer, I go back to it from time to time to refresh my memory on Ruby specifics I don’t deal with every day and that tend to fade over the months.

Whatever your level, I encourage you to try a little Ruby Koans session to reach “Ruby Zen”!