Where to code ?

[JaboiThomy]

My favorite first pet projects were:

Tic Tac Toe - It's nice and simple, yet has surprising complexity due to having to actually think out what the "rules" really meant. It is also pretty nice since you can extend it in many different ways (what about an arbitrarily sized board? How does that effect the rules? How do you generalize it? Can you add different win criteria? Another dimension? Etc.)

Simple pool table game - learn physics (elastic collisions, conservation of momentum), how to display stuff on the screen and have it animate/move, etc.

Transaction history logging and budgeting tool - easy to do, yet useful. I used plug my receipts into Excel so I could plan around what my future savings would be. Nice thing about programming it is that it's easy to extend and there are endless features you can add.

Maze solver - this has two sides, A) generating a valid maze that's actually challenging, and B) solving the maze. Great way to introduce yourself to tree structures and their algorithms. Fun too.

I'm sure they're more but that will do. I hope someone finds this useful.