Kotlin Thursdays: Kotlin Koans with Ben Rodriguez

@apichamion  

Hey everyone! Welcome to Kotlin Thursdays.  With some many languages out there you might be asking yourself WHY should I learn Kotlin? I asked myself the same question and for me, I was interested in learning Kotlin because it is one of the fastest growing languages within the developer community according to Github contributions and TechRepublic analysts. Many are praising the flexibility and interoperability with the JVM.

I am 42 years old and haven’t written in Java and Spring in a long while.  I like learning this language because Kotlin makes programming fun again and this is in large part thanks to the strong community. I’m learning how to develop in a different way and makes my mind adjust to new patterns. Functionally Kotlin is different but like Java, it compiles down to bytes so a developer can flip back and forth between Kotlin and Java.  Kotlin made the most sense from a readability standpoint which we will see in the video.

Within this lesson which is both a blog post and a video, I’m going to discuss some of the resources available for someone can learn kotlin. There will be online classes, websites and some books.   This course like all training courses does have a few assumptions or prerequisites. This lesson assumes you have a minimal amount of programming knowledge and that you know what an integrated development environment, can install the EduTools plugin, understand build tools and have access to the internet.

Here are some of the resources that  I'm going to go over to help get jumpstarted in Kotlin.

• Kotlin Koans
• The Cousera course
• The book list at the bottom

Within the last part of the video, I'm going to go over the Kotlin koans website Where I will break down five of the first lessons. In subsequent videos, I will highlight other Kotlin learning activities while completing the entire set of koans.

For this walkthrough, you will need to install the EduTools plugin into IntelliJ!

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/education/install-edutools-plugin.html?section=IntelliJ%20IDEA

Here is another overview of what we are doing -   

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/education/learner-start-guide.html?s...

Websites and Courses

Think of these resources as supplemental if you happen to be more curious.  We always encourage looking into documentation for things you use!

• Udemy “Kotlin for Beginners: Learn Programming With Kotlin”: https://www.udemy.com/kotlin-cou...
• Treehouse ”Kotlin for Java Developers”: https://teamtreehouse.com/librar...
• Pluralsight “Kotlin Fundamentals”: https://www.pluralsight.com/cour...
• Most popular Kotlin projects, libraries and other frameworks: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reso...,
• Kotlin Koans: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/tutorials/koans.html
• Coursera "Kotlin for Java Developers": https://www.coursera.org/learn/kotlin-for-java-developers

Books

• Kotlin in Action by “Dmitry Jemerov and Svetlana Isakova”
• Hands on Microservices with Kotlin by “Juan Antonio Medina Iglesias”