programming puzzles?

[mensanator at aol.com]

John Salerno wrote:
> Similar to the Python Challenge, does anyone know of any other websites
> or books that have programming puzzles to solve? I found a book called
> "Puzzles for Hackers", but it seems like it might be a little advanced
> for me, and I've also read that it focuses too much on encryption and
> security issues and doesn't really have coding problems, exactly. But
> something like that book would be fun to have.

Personally, I am an avid reader of rec.puzzles. Not because
I like doing stupid puzzles per se, but I look at them from the
viewpoint "how would I write a program to solve this?"
Even simple word problems sometimes involves more trouble than
the puzzle is worth, but it teaches you how to write algorithms to
generate permutations, combinations, partitions, etc. that can be
handy for other applications. And it's one thing to generate letter
patterns, determining if they are English words is something else,
which can teach you about database and such.

Many puzzle purists bristle at this attitude, but I do this for
myself, not for them.