Thread: Java projects for beginner

I came up with some lists for you of little programming "assignments" that you could try. I don't know if you've learned GUI yet, though, so I've sorted these into GUI and not GUI for you.

You don't have to use GUI for these:
- make a program that can do your math homework. That is, write different programs for every type of math problem you come across. It's good practice and I found actually helped me understand the stuff I learned in math class more too.
- learn the theory behind quicksort or mergesort and try to write your own implementation of it (it's challenging but fun)
- write a program that recursively prints out the Fibonnaci sequence - the user inputs how many numbers it should print out
- a program that generates random math problems for the user to solve and keeps track of how many you get right and wrong
- One cool thing I did last year was to write a program that knew Latin grammar (which is straightforward enough to be taught to a program) and quizzed me on noun and verb endings. If you learn French or something, you could write a program that quizzes you on the tenses of verbs based on their endings. I put all the bases in a text file and had my program read from that and add random endings. I found it pretty useful. Just an idea.
- a program that prints out Pascal's triangle
- a program that tries to guess a number from 1 to 100 that you've picked. The user can say "higher" or "lower" after each guess. The program takes this information to figure out what the next best guess would be, and says that.

If you learn GUIs, you can do a lot more:
- Two-player tic-tac-toe game that detects wins and ties
- Slightly harder: tic-tac-toe where your program plays the user (your program has artificial intelligence, yay)
- Program where a ball bounces around the JPanel (collision detection included: it bounces off walls and your mouse)
- Minesweeper - this is kind of difficult.
- Sierpinski's triangle - make your program draw the triangle with RECURSION!
- Tetris

Really, making any sort of game is a lot of fun. Try making up your own.

If you want to make something you can use, that is much harder. Here are some suggestions:
- learn Java networking and play around with sockets. Try to create a simple chat program between two computers in the same network. (A client class and server class.)
- learn how to read text files, and write a program that can search a given text file to see if a certain word or phrase appears in it (or better yet, counts the number of times it appears)
- a media player is, I imagine, quite hard, but you could try a simple program where the user can draw on the JPanel and then save the drawing. It's not that much to learn - I learned a lot by just googling and reading the API.

Yeah, it's true that you should learn the basics before learning how to dress up with GUIs. But whenever you get the chance, learn GUI! It's not hard to get into, but it can be challenging in a fun way, and it's like the last step before actually being able to design useful programs or games.

By the way, I've heard great things about that book. Did you find it a good Java book?