Projects

Projects to Build Skills

Programming language skills begin with the basic syntax and semantics of the language. They advance through the solution of small exercises and are refined through solving more complete problems.

Real-world” applications, used every day in business and research, are less than ideal for learning a programming language. The business-oriented problems often have a very narrow in focus; the solutions are dictated by odd budgetary constraints or departmental politics. Reasearch problems are also narrowly focused, often lacking a final “application” to surround the interesting parts of the programming and create a final, finished product.

This part provides several large exercises that provide for more advanced programming than the smaller exercises at the end of each section. These aren't real-world in scope, but they are quite a bit larger than the small exercises at the end of each chapter.

We cover several problems that have interesting algorithms. These are ranked in order of difficulty.

Chapter 37, Areas of the Flag . Computing the area of the symbols on the American flag.

Chapter 38, The Date of Easter . Finding the date for Easter in a given year.

Chapter 39, Musical Pitches . Computing the frequencies of various musical pitches.

Chapter 40, Bowling Scores . Computing the score in a game of bowling.

Chapter 41, Mah Jongg Hands . Evaluate a winning Mah Jongg hand.

Chapter 42, Chess Game Notation . Interpreting the log from a game of chess.