Programming exercises/challenges

[Edwin]

On Nov 18, 6:39 pm, btk... at email.unc.edu wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm learning Python by teaching myself, and after going through several
> tutorials I feel like I've learned the basics. Since I'm not taking a
> class or anything, I've been doing challenges/programs to reinforce the
> material and improve my skills. I started out with stuff like "Guess my
> number" games, hangman, etc. and moved on to making poker and card
> games to work with classes. For GUIs I created games like minesweeper,
> and a GUI stock portfolio tracker. I am out of ideas and am looking forprogrammingprojects, challenges, or programs that have helped you'll
> learn. I'm working on the project Euler problems, but I find that they
> don't really help myprogrammingskills; they are more math focused.
> Suggestions? What has been useful or interesting to you? I'd also
> welcome sources of textbook type problems, because the ones provided in
> tutorials tend to be repetitive.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben

I'm also learning Python by myself, downloading open ebooks, reading
tutorials, reading other people's code, etc. and in order to put my
knowledge into practice I've been writing small programs to solve my
everyday computer problems: a simple email client (because sometimes
it seems to me that email clients now have so many features and
preferences) that reads my fetchmailrc, a diary manager compatible
with my Emacs diary file (sometimes I don't want to open Emacs for a
quick note)... in general I try to solve problems related to my own
workflow.

I also try to play with some of my girlfriend's ideas on computer use:
she came up with an idea for a calculator with which she could easily
keep track of our bills (but found financial software a bit
complicated for simple tasks, once again, too many features and
preferences) so I started to code a small multi-touch app as
"intuitive" as possible (and still working on it).

What I'm saying is that I've found useful not to think about
programming itself but just think of it as a medium to solve my own
(common) problems.

Best regards,
E.