Hello!

Some time ago I signed up for Programmer’s Passport at Grox.io and just recently finished first language, so I though I will write a small review.

What is Programmer’s Passport?

Following theory that every good programmer should be polyglot (not master in every language, but know a few) Programmer’s Passport is a online place to give you a knowledge about interesting languages, so you can grow. As for the time of writing there’re 4 languages: Crystal, Pony, Prolog, Elixir. You can see that the selection is.. unorthodox - and I like it! Possibly that will interest you, dear reader, as well!

I just finished Crystal, so my review is based only on that.

The bad

As there are way less bad things (spoilers!) I will start with them.

1. With the books and projects I didn’t get to experience low level stuff that Crystal is capable of
2. The projects seemed a bit too tiny
3. There’s one error in instructions I found - when cloning repo to CrystalLife there’s wrong repo crystal-life and not crystal-life-board. This wasn’t a big issue, bit broke the flow

The neutral

I don’t know if that’s me using Safari, but website on projects view was a bit wonky. Projects kept hiding, but I don’t know if that’s me - I still keep accidentaly using touchbar as I’m not used to it.

The good

1. It was a good overview of language. The book was really well written, with good examples. I may be really biased, because I like to read about programming.
2. Projects may were bit short, but they were really fun!
3. Exercism exercises were well chosen - with some warnings what not to take to be disencouraged. It made introduction to language smoother.
4. A LOT of materials. And really good ones.
5. Seeing happy Bruce doing something wonderful - sharing knowledge.
6. Reminders that new chapters are ready, but sitll being able to progress at your own pace.
7. Projects themselves. I wrote about them being fun, but they required to use knowledge gotten during the course of whole course.
8. Focus on tests, even testing your web part of an app. Nice!

First look conclusion.

Did I have fun? Yes! Do I regret spending money? Absolutely no! Will I continue learning with Programmer’s Passport? Hell yeah! There were some little things, but for first course/language this was a really solid run. I can surely recommend it. I will now jump to Prolog or Elixir to see how they progressed and return to Pony later.

Adn thank you Bruce for this, you rock!