So many fun programming languages out there, and more emerging all the time. But who has time to learn them all? I certainly don’t, but I still want to learn. One issue I have is that I don’t learn that well by reading through a language reference or a tutorial. I learn best by doing, and when it comes to learning a new language, I learn best when I have a specific task I am trying to accomplish. To that end, I was thinking that it would nice to have a list of essential, yet simple, programming exercises, preferably ones that are suited for higher level languages. These would give me concrete goals to research whilst attempting to learn a new language. Further, I would build up a small repository of sample programs to which I could refer later. When I need to write something in Perl, my chief method of refreshing my skill is to look back on similar code I wrote as many as 10 years ago.

I did a cursory Google search for something along these lines, but came up empty-handed. It may be necessary to start assembling a list of my own. This would include items like:

• Reading a file, line by line, and processing each line through a regular expression; or perhaps a more complicated, less sed-style textual processing application
• Opening a socket to a web server and fetching a web page; perhaps screen-scrape something useful off of the fetched data
• Write a simple web server (and consider carefully the security implications of what you produce)
• If the language has a graphics API (e.g., through something like gd or SDL), create a canvas, draw some dots, lines, shapes, load a font and write some text, load an image and blt it; decode a video in real-time using FFmpeg
• If the language has an API for accessing your favorite database, use it to connect to the db server, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, etc.; understand how the API can organize query data into the language’s native data structures (e.g., Perl’s DBI can fetch the results into a hash array which is extremely useful and intuitive)

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Another important aspect would be specific exercises targeted at understanding the language’s native data structures since those tend to be a key selling point of many very high level languages.