Recently, Ryan Anklam started up a project called ColdFusion Koans. Here is the description:

The ColdFusion Koans are intended to help newcomers and veterans alike learn or fine-tune their ColdFusion programming skills. This is a community driven project so everybody is welcome to contribute new tests!

This is a fabulous idea which can only benefit the CF community, especially since so many of us have had to learn the language while "on the job" and sometimes find that their time is spent mostly on billable work, which leaves little or no room for self-improvement. The Koans exercises are simple enough that you can just keep the folder on your development environment, and set a browser window, and work through the exercise when you need a break from trying to fix that perplexing bug.

I had fun going through it. It did take a while for me to get the hang of it. But I finally figured out that the goal is to first work through one koan section, entering what you think are the right variables. Then you go back to the browser window and reload to see which passed and which failed, then go at these again until you get these passed. Try not to peek at the error info before working through the exercises. Right now, I have 73% - some of my successes surprised me because I'm just terrible at math (I have some sort of a math disability that results in math concepts not really sticking in my mind). The others I've been trying to figure out where I went wrong; some CF concepts I've not really had much experience with.

So, the next step is to go through my CF references and hopefully find the answers, and then add to the git project and send Ryan a pull notice. I encourage you all to do the same! If we all pitch in, we can come up with something like Ruby Koans.



This entry was posted on November 6, 2011 at 4:30 AM and has received 2292 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.