Thread: Let's brainstorm..

Hello,

Imagine some imaginary context, problem and a solution for new programmers or new(experienced) c programmers, who have no experience whatsoever. And want to improve their knowledge.

I thought of some simple starters:

- dev todo ( a todo program)
- a random wallpaper wrapper.

- your idea


- Joe

Ok here's one. A video rental company hires you to write their customer software. This software should include: saving the customers names and phone numbers, and if they have any movies checked out. Also it needs a way to display the customer's data and currently checked out rentals. To make it simple, it CAN be a console program.

An XML parser?

Originally Posted by dwks

An XML parser?

all of xml or a specific subset?
got a dtd handy for the xml set you are talking about?



parsing xml isn't that hard, you only actually have to check for well formedness. [ every tag is explicitly closed, the declaration and encoding and namespace are correct, that element names begin with a legal character and that there are no crossed subsets ]

xml is in and of itself a very small set of requirements, the power comes from the lack of restrictions in it.
the restrictions come from the implementations, like xhtml, which has far tighter definitions than xml itself.

Originally Posted by jmd15

Ok here's one. A video rental company hires you to write their customer software. This software should include: saving the customers names and phone numbers, and if they have any movies checked out. Also it needs a way to display the customer's data and currently checked out rentals. To make it simple, it CAN be a console program.

you would have to add date due, overdue days, have a cost per day for both rental and overdue, allow for discounts / specials as well as outright sales.

a dos version exists, called rapid rental, and works for a number of rental businesses.
( I had a job one time where this app was the company's main it investment. )

Originally Posted by blackswan

make your own database tool like sql in C.

how much of sql would it support?
( oracle, mysql, postgresql, sqllite, mssql, sybase, interbase..... all support only about 75% of the language specification. )

Just google for "programming contests"

Originally Posted by jmd15

Ok here's one. A video rental company hires you to write their customer software. This software should include: saving the customers names and phone numbers, and if they have any movies checked out. Also it needs a way to display the customer's data and currently checked out rentals. To make it simple, it CAN be a console program.

Don't even get me started on that sort of scenario. That's pretty much what we have to do for our A Level programming assignment (in Pascal *shudder*) it's just so dull. Ok, so for everyone else in my lectures it's meant to introduce them to programming, but come on, they could have thought of something more interesting. My GCSE ICT coursework was documenting a similar system (but we didn't implement it).

Lol, I guess my video rental program is well liked.... Yes I know Jaqui it was just an idea for people to do if they wanted something to make. I know that in reality it would need to includes dates, and prices, etc, but I left those off for simplicity's sake since he asked to start off with easy ideas.