Programming exercises/challenges

[Mensanator]

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 for
> programming projects, 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 my programming skills; they are more math focused.
> Suggestions? What has been useful or interesting to you?

Math problems. :-)

> I'd also
> welcome sources of textbook type problems, because the ones provided in
> tutorials tend to be repetitive.

I read rec.puzzles regularly and always approach each puzzle
in a "how would I solve this with a program" way. Not all
lend themselves to computer solutions, some of the regulars
there frown on computer answers and some are simply math
problems in disguise. I follow sci.math for the same reason.

And alt.math. And alt.math.recreational.

Another hobby I have is tracking movie box-office receipts
(where you can make interesting graphs comparing Titanic
to Harry Potter or how well the various sequels do, if Pierce
Brosnan saved the James Bond franchise, what can you say about
Daniel Craig?). Lots of potential database problems there.
Not to mention automating the data collection from the Internet
Movie Database by writing a web page scraper than can grab
six months worth of data in a single session (you probably
wouldn't need this if you cough up a subscription fee for
professional access, but I'm not THAT serious about it).

There is nothing like such a hobby to provide motivation to
learn programming.

Here's something interesting: take a films opening weekend
box-office receipts and multiply it by Pi. You'll get the
film's total gross.

>
> Thanks,
> Ben