Ask HN: Increasingly difficult list of programming questions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Increasingly difficult list of programming questions?

8 pointsandy_ppp9 comments

Hello Hackernews!

I am currently teaching my friend how to program - she's a very smart girl with a good Maths degree behind her and I've just explained a small bit of Javascript and asked her to implement the FizzBuzz program on codepen. She passed this with flying colours and is hungry for more 'fun' assignments.

I think it would be really great for her to get an email from me each week with a new programming assignment for her to fit into her busy schedule and will encourage her to keep learning.

So are there any fun assignments that you remember doing; I always think doing something real (where you happen to learn fundamentals) is better than saying "off you go learn about object orientation" or functional programming or MVC.

Does something like this exist online or in a book? I've been looking but nothing feels quite right...

Thanks!

Project Euler? https://projecteuler.net/

Brilliant! That is a really good start and it'll probably help me clarify my thinking by writing up a context to the problems for her too!

Some things that are about programming structure are probably on the cards as well as these more algorithm-y questions, but thanks a lot!

Personally I found MIT Ocw's Intro to Programming in Python to be awesome. That is a complete course, which may be more than you are looking for. But the problem sets were really fun. I did the 2008 class but there is an updated one that I have not revisited: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

I don't know how 'real' they are, but I really enjoy making my way through the 99 problems https://sites.google.com/site/prologsite/prolog-problems . The link is to the (AFAIK) original, Prolog version, but the problems are sufficiently general that you can work on them in any language, and a little Googling will probably turn them up for your language of choice.

If you don't know about this yet, it is excellent:

http://exercism.io/

I've found CodeEval.com to be a pretty fun way to brush up for coding interviews, maybe that would help.

http://www.codewars.com/

HackerRank.com

I found their functional programming series to be a good way to get acquainted with Haskell -- problems start with basic operations, move on to recursion, lists, other data structures, and so on. As early as the recursion section we see some neat challenges: for example, write a program that prints an ASCII art version of the Serpinski triangle to a given depth.

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