Exercises for Programmers: 57 Challenges to Develop Your Coding Skills

One of the best ways to learn a programming language is to use it to solve problems. That’s what this book is all about. Instead of questions rooted in theory, this book presents problems you’ll encounter in everyday software development. These problems are designed for people learning their first programming language, and they also provide a learning path for experienced developers to learn a new language quickly.

Start with simple input and output programs. Do some currency conversion and figure out how many months it takes to pay off a credit card. Calculate blood alcohol content and determine if it’s safe to drive. Replace words in files and filter records, and use web services to display the weather, store data, and show how many people are in space right now. At the end you’ll tackle a few larger programs that will help you bring everything together.

Each problem includes constraints and challenges to push you further, but it’s up to you to come up with the solutions. And next year, when you want to learn a new programming language or style of programming (perhaps OOP vs. functional), you can work through this book again, using new approaches to solve familiar problems.