A great first project: Random number guesser

A fellow list member (& coworker) wrote in with a response to yesterday’s post about learning new things with tiny projects.

My first program in any programming language is almost always a number guessing game (“guess the number the computer is thinking of”).

Makes you figure out keyboard I/O, parsing a string as an integer, random numbers and rounding, and basic control flow (conditionals and loops), all starting with a very minimal and easy-to-understand problem.

This is a great small project that you can easily accomplish in an afternoon!

Taking the lesson from yesterday’s post about tiny wins, you can see how each phase of this project is a mini-challenge while the overall goal is easily achievable in a short amount of time.

Just another reminder that your side projects don’t have to be flashy or big in order for them to teach you a lot.

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