Exercism: A Great Addition To Your Learning Plan

Learning by doing has been proven effective and is the same when learning a new programming language. However, it is also equally important that you learn the right things and in the correct manner. Having a mentor or a goto person in the field that you are leaning is essential. Exercism brings both together under one place and free of cost.

Exercism is an online platform designed to help improve your coding skills through practice and mentorship.

Exercism is a great site to accompany your journey in learning something new.

• It has a good set of problems to work your way through the language.
• A good breakdown of the language concepts covered through the exercises. Exercism gives an overview on what to concentrate next.
• The best part is the mentor feedback system. Each time you submit a main/core exercise, there is an approval system in place. To me, learning a language is more about understanding the language-specific features and writing more idiomatic code.

Exercism is entirely open source and open to your contributions as well. It takes a lot of effort to maintain something of this standard — also a great effort from the mentors by providing feedback.

Feedback is useful, especially when moving across programming paradigms - like between OO and Functional.

Solving a problem is just one piece of the puzzle. Writing idiomatic code is equally important, especially when learning a new language. Feedbacks such as the above helps you think in the language (in my case, F#).

Don’t wait for feedback approval, but work on side exercises. Twitter or slack channels are also a great way to request feedback. Reading along with a book helps if you need more structured learning. For F# I have been reading the book Real World Functional Programming

I discovered Exercism while learning FSharp. It has definitely helped keep me in the loop. Hope it helps you!