Give me an assignment in C

Question

I am teaching myself C, with several books as well as online tutorials. I am in the middle of Greg Perry's book Absolute Beginner's Guide to C. I know I learn best by doing, so I need to start writing my own code. My problem is that I am a little stymied by not being able to come up with ideas for programs that will exercise my skills and not be beyond them. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Update: I have entered a Code-golf, written a small number guessing game, put a couple of great books on my wishlist, and explored some great sites that will challenge me for probably years to come. Thanks all!

Update: Finished my first Project Euler problem.

Answer 1

http://projecteuler.net/

Good for any language. (Bring your own math library)

Answer 2

Implement a doubly-linked list using a single pointer.

Answer 3

Take Kernigan & Ritchie book. There are a lot of really good exercises.

Answer 4

Silly simple example, with little to no practicle use:

Write an application that will accept a line of text input, and output the words in the reversed order.

Example:

Input - "The world is a strange place!"

Output - "place! strange a is world The"

• Use only the memory needed to store the original string (no temp variables, etc.)

Answer 5

You can write a simple "game" using C - such as blackjack or poker - don't worry about AI just write an engine that would enable several players to play the game on the same computer.

Another good "start project" is a simple calculator - write a calculator that receives a string and returns a result. Assume you'll always get a string of number op number (.i.e. "2 + 2") and build from there.

Answer 6

A Hello World program :)

A program that prints the factorial of a given number

A program that takes in input a list, creates a copy of a list and reverses the original list.

An implementation of a Bubblesort (Horrible algorithm, but good for practice) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble%5Fsort

Answer 7

Click this: code-golf

Enter every challenge that has at least 10 upvotes even if you are weeks or months late, and even if your solution isn't so great. (You don't have to actually post it unless you want to, but get each one working...)

We will be watching.

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Update: This question is in the most-viewed and highest-voted lists. This answer is in the most-commented list. Laura has already entered her first challenge, so at least it is leading to practice.

Code-golf on stackoverflow may be a bit different than elsewhere

The c-g scene is a bit deeper than it sounds, especially as it relates to SO.

Yes, there are some "true Perl c-g" entries. But most entries are not Perl. I enter in Ruby usually; most people enter in the language they are currently most interested in, and the objective is not as simple as just beating Perl. (Though I do keep trying.)

C-g has zillions of benefits; the character-crunching thing is an entirely optional part of the activity.

In fact, often most of the entries are uncompressed, and they are in Java and C# and other languages that have no chance of winning. So why is that? It's because c-g is more than a golf-scoring contest. We get at least as many entries from people who are learning or showing off their favorite language than we do from people who are writing crunched Perl. And that's great.

Obviously, no educational opportunity will be perfect. One is unlikely to be building binary trees or hash tables, but it does seem like C-G on SO is worth it for many people.

Answer 8

All good C books I read (and most bad ones) have exercises, usually at the end of every chapter/section. I'm not familiar with your book, but it also probably has exercises.

Answer 9

Go in this sequence

1. Given an integer, determine whether it is a prime number or not.
2. Given an integer n , generate a Fibonacci series upto n
3. Then do some array practice- sorting algorithms-bubble.sequential sorts etc.

Answer 10

Read in matrix data from files specified on the command line. Perform some operation (for example, multiplication, transpose, inverse). Write data out to a file.

This will give you practice with file I/O, dynamic memory allocation, looping over arrays, and optimization.

Answer 11

I'm a visual learner so when I started out I was fascinated with animation.

Along those lines, I have 3 progressively difficult exercises:

1.) Create a bouncing ball animation that bounces off the edges of the screen.

2.) Create 100 bouncing balls that all do the same thing but in different directions. You'll have to leverage arrays to do this.

3.) Create an n-body simulation with these 100 balls where every ball is attracted to every other ball by gravity. You'll again have to use an array but with a nested loop to handle the gravity. (I have a few tutorials on the subject if you want to see my implementation.)

Answer 12

A program to find prime numbers from 1 to x where the user fills in the X?

You could also give the user the option to write the results to the disk instead of the standard out.

Once the basic program is working, you could then add threading to make it work faster....

Answer 13

Write a text adventure.

printf("You are standing in front of a building.\n");

EDIT: Not sure why the hate - did you think I was being facetious? That line was just to get him started, not meant to be the whole thing. If you think it's a bad idea, all right, but this is what I did to get started programming.

Answer 14

Try implementing your own printf() in terms of putchar() and/or fputs(stdout). This will require you to do some simple string parsing, and will involve some nested loops, quite a lot of conditionals, and some pointer arithmetic (which you'll need to learn to be proficient in C anyway). You can start with handling %s, %u, %d and %f, and then gradually add support for more specifiers.

Answer 15

Make a program that can multiply arbitralily long (well ... 10 thousand digits) numbers.

I think you'll need

• data structures
• malloc (and friends) for memory management
• math
• possibly string management

Remember to make several source files, separated by subject, so that you can reuse them for other projects.

Answer 16

So you want to drill seriously huh? click here

Answer 17

int a;
a = 1; // an assignment

Answer 18

1. Write a program which will calculate and list the moves necessary to solve the Tower of Hanoi problem for three discs and three rods.
2. Modify the program to solve the problem with four discs.
3. Modify the program to solve the problem for a number of disks specified on the command line.

Answer 19

http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=ProblemArchive

Answer 20

Implement parts of the standard library yourself. strcpy is a good one for getting your head around pointers and strings. Other functions vary in their complexity and focus.

Obligatory disclaimer: Don't use your own implementations -- just test them. If you actually need to do a strcpy (or anything else that's in the standard library), use the standard library.

Answer 21

Try doing "Object Oriented" design in C: If you look at the FILE pointer stuff in the standard library, you'll find indications on how to dynamically call a "method" on an "object". Try implementing your own little set of "objects" and get the feeling of this mechanism.

Answer 22

Once you are fairly comfortable with the basics of C, develop a basic text editor. It will give you a chance to implement pretty much all the basic features in c , along with pointers.

Answer 23

I would check out the problems here:Bring You Own Code I regularly visit this site and learn about what NOT to do as a programmer. Recently they started adding these little challanges with responses posted in the comments. You can compare you results with others in you desired language and really learn a lot.

Answer 24

Write a text version of "Don't Press the Red Button". That's how I started my son on Python...

Answer 25

Create a support schedule: given number of days to cover and number of people, create a fair schedule to cover the days. Introduce complications like no early and late support on same day, no late support more than 2 days in a row and so on.

Answer 26

Write a tail program command for Windows and make it accept -f option.

:)

Simple enough and very useful.

You may find the source code very easily but trying to figure out how to do it your self would be valuable

Answer 27

if you read C for dummies then you can get more assignment

Answer 28

Programming Praxis is another good site to practice programming. I find it great for learning another language and some of the problems are fitting for just starting out.