Duct Tape And Turing Machines

A neat little series of exercises I ran across a while ago: 21 code kata. It’s a set of problems that challenges you to approach each problem from many angles and explore the tools you use to solve it; the journey is more important than arriving at a solution. I’ve done a couple of these in the process of learning Ruby and they’re actually pretty fun.

Speaking of Ruby, the guy who wrote the kata is one of the authors of the Pickaxe Book. I recently picked up the dead-tree edition that covers Ruby 1.8 and was very impressed. It’s some of the best technical writing I’ve read- up there with The Little Schemer and Thinking In Java.