Extra Practice
Another reader asked a similar question some time ago. Look on the second page of this blog for the entry by PaulBerry (titled Extra Practice) and some of the answers he received.
Part of the problem as a writer is thinking up exercises that are possible with the knowledge level that can be assumed at a given point in the book. For example, asking the reader to do a database project at the end of an early chapter (e.g., Chapter 3) is unrealistic. So, for your own point in time, try writing code for: 1) Something that interests you, and 2) is consistent with your current skill set. Early in the book, something using formulas is common, like converting currencies, temperatures to different bases, decimal to binary and vice versa. As you gain experience, move from formula-based stuff to objects. Write code that simulates an appliance (oven, TV, phone) or a ball falling down a flight of stairs, or falling dominoes. Card games are also interesting and have terrific potential to use OOP concepts. I had one student who wanted to learn assembly language for a small microcontroller so he wrote a program that took in an assembly language source code file and single-stepped through it, showing what happened to the general processing and flag registers as the code was processed...pretty cool, but also pretty difficult. (He got an A.)
Let your mind bounce off the walls a bit and you'll come up with plenty of practice exercises.
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Jack Purdum, Ph.D.
Author: Beginning C# 3.0: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming (and 14 other programming texts)
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