I learned about PSKoans while attending a PowerShell Deep Dive put on by Mike Pfeiffer and Cloudskills.io. It came up in the chat from one of the attendees, while we were discussing tools to assist learning PowerShell and becoming more comfortable with writing tests for your code.
Getting started is super simple, as the instructions on the original GitHub repository describe. In less than 5 minutes I was running “Measure-Karma” to begin the journey of PSKoans.
I did have to run “Set-PSKoanLocation -path <localpath>” in order to get it to recognize the set of files I wanted, rather than creating new Koan files within c:\users\<username>\PSKoans. This was important to me, so that I could control the files that were actually being used through Git (since I forked the project to my own GitHub repository). This allows me to proceed with PSKoans on multiple computers by syncing that repository.
I’ve now gone through the first 3 files, and while I can see the value in this tool for confirming and discovering new depths of PowerShell knowledge, I definitely would not suggest it to a PowerShell beginner.
For someone who understands the structure of the primary PowerShell components and the capabilities of things like Get-Help and Get-Command, I think it would provide the right amount of challenge to understand what is being asked and find the solutions naturally.
I would strongly recommend “PowerShell in a Month of Lunches” for a PowerShell novice before embarking upon PSKoans.
