What’s a Code Kata?

These materials are extracted from following blog:

http://codekata.pragprog.com/

Suppose that you are interested in learning a new programming language. Surely you don't have a teacher to be trained by . It is evident reading a book on the topic makes you familiar with the concepts but you intended to be a good developer in the language. Which method you like to employ to reach your goal.

As a group, software developers don’t practice enough. Most of our learning takes place on the job, which means that most of our mistakes get made there as well. Other creative professions practice: artists carry a sketchpad, musicians play technical pieces, poets constantly rewrite works. In karate, where the aim is to learn to spar or fight, most of a student’s time is spent learning and refining basic moves. The more formal of these exercises are called kata.

To help developers get the same benefits from practicing, we’re putting together a series of code kata: simple, artificial exercises which let us experiment and learn without the pressure of a production environment. Our suggestions for doing the kata are:

• find a place and time where you won’t be interrupted
• focus on the essential elements of the kata
• remember to look for feedback for every major decision
• if it helps, keep a journal of your progress
• have discussion groups with other developers, but try to have completed the kata first

There are no right or wrong answers in these kata: the benefit comes from the process, not from the result.

Some of the Kata's are listed below:

• 1. Supermarket Pricing
• 2. Karate Chop
• 3. How Big, How Fast?
• 4. Data Munging
• 5. Bloom Filters
• 6. Anagrams
• 7. How'd I Do?
• 8. Conflicting Objectives
• 9. Back to the CheckOut
• 10. Hashes vs. Classes
• 11. Sorting it Out
• 12. Best Sellers
• 13, Counting Code Lines
• 14. Tom Swift Under Milk Wood
• 15. Playing With Bits
• 16. Business Rules
• 17. More Business Processing
• 18. Transitive Dependencies
• 19. Word Chains
• 20. Klondike
• 21. Simple Lists

My goal is to implement these Katas in Groovy.