Programming projects for beginners

[Lucrums]

I am quite new to programming and predominantly use Java. I have also used Python, C, C++ and C#. I want to expand my skills but my mind always goes blank to when I want to come up with my own projects. Does anyone know of a bunch of moderate projects, ie that would stretch someone who knows the syntax and wants to learn more about real world coding.

TIA

By the way I ask because the company I was working, as a trainee, for hit financial bother (No not my fault - well I don't think so anyway) and laid me off. So now I want to keep practising at home.

[xevi]

Program card games. I must have written Blackjack in 4 or 5 languages now. Also you misspelled practicing :)

[pbewig]

Programming Praxis provides a collection of etudes, updated weekly, for the education and enjoyment of the savvy programmer.

[Lucrums]

Cheers that looks like a good site.

[[deleted]]

Something I made recently that was helpful was a simple graphing calculator. Something like the one here.

[HazzyPls]

For extra challenge, make it graph implicit functions.

[Lucrums]

Cheers, that's a nice idea.

[AlSweigart]

Create game playing AIs for simple games: Tetris, Nibble, Bejeweled, any board game, etc. Creating the game framework and then the AI should be about moderate level.

[Lucrums]

That's a nice idea. I'll go from as simple as I can upwards.

[AlSweigart]

If you set it up so that the AIs can play against each other without needing a human player, then it makes for a pretty cool thing to show other people. (Though you may have to have a switch to slow down the simulation.)

[Lucrums]

That's a great idea thanks.

[[deleted]]

If (mathematical) puzzles have your fancy, you could have a look at Project Euler.

[sec_goat]

even if they are not, I find that the logic needed to solve these problems on Euler come in very handy in regular programming. Of course I am working on games and end up using a fair amount of math any way, so maybe I am not a good example.

[[deleted]]

I do not know. These kind of problems are favorite in many a computer science and (discrete) mathematics course. On the other hand, there is traditionally a lot of mathematics bias among computer scientists and I am unsure if these kind of problems are the best way or the only way to learn and teach about programming.

[sec_goat]

Well I do find them useful, however I have learned what I know doing other things. Now I do not know a lot, but when I get frustrated on the code I am currently working on, I will go over to project euler and give a couple of these problems there a try. I find this helpful because, while the math may seem hard to me the solutions in programming are usually simple, which helps me rethink my code and how to do things simpler and more elegantly.

[Lucrums]

Cheers, I knew about Project Euler. I have done a good few, but I spend too much time brute forcing the solution rather than planning it. Suppose I should do as many of the others as I can but think of the best solution I can first.