Oh I forgot to mention... for what purpose?

The platforms and development environments are probably even more important than the language these days. .NET, Java SE/EE, etc. The reason is that a lot of functions and routines that we used to have to look up in algorithm books are built-in to the libraries. Saves a ton of time! This why some people I know won't hire .NET programmers. It's because 98% of .NET people are idiots who couldn't come up with working logic or algorithms to solve a simple problem, like finding the shortest path from point A to point B in a maze.

Actually, the maze program would be another good practice. Write a program that presents a 20x20 matrix. Insert X number of random blocks. Write program in C# to find shortest path from 1,1 to 20,20 (assuming that path is not blocked by randomly placed blocks.) Also, do this in a object oriented way. Don't cheat and write a C program. Write a real C# program.

Purpose? A year ago out of curiosity I tried HTML. I liked the fact that I could create something new out of a few lines of code.

The keyword here is "create" and that is my purpose. I want to become a professional software developer. The PC, be it a desktop, laptop or smart device has integrated itself in my life. I enjoy creating something new from scratch with some lines of code, be it for a haiku or a software application. If the haiku-software application reference sounds weird, try Python.

The project goal I have now is to create maths game application in Java. I will make a note of your tips.

Purr1n, did you work as a programmer/dev. before going to EC?

Purr1n, did you work as a programmer/dev. before going to EC?

Up to 2002 I did programming work, although less consistent from 1999 onward because I got into web infrastructure and security. x86 assembly, C, VB, Enterprise Java, .NET (early). From 2003, was audit / ethical hacking, although I did a short stint as IT Director at a small community bank for a few years.

I still program for fun. For example at my last horrible job, which only lasted one year, the decision makers decided to implement an audit management system for $100,000 per year. Unfortunately, the system sucked so bad, that everyone worked in Excel anyways, and then spent one or two weeks after every audit copying stuff over. The UI was from hell.

I wasn't going to have any of that so I wrote a bot to screen scrape the content Excel files and paste data over to the system, including checking the right boxes, reformatting according to certain logic (it wasn't one-to-one between Excel and the system). Also, I wrote programs that took "core dumps" (antivirus reports, IDS, patch reports, etc.) and reformatted them into handy "audit process" tables according to our formal audit documentation standards. 

I only pretended to be busy during these times - and no way I was gonna tell anyone I could speed up the work by 30%. (Since in big corporations, VPs protect their turf and their budgets, mainly because they can go on power trips and skull-fuck people who they think have crossed them. I'm mean, really nothing else to do, and some people associate their work with their lives.)

I wrote worms and stuff, for fun. Now I write bots for games. I wrote a bot for SWTOR so I only needed to click the mouse button to attack (most of the time). Would screen-scrape / OCR numbers / cooldowns to choose the right attack / chain for max DPS.

I write a few custom hacking tools now and them. Been doing ethical hacking since 2003.

eeew VB, I had to do some stuff with it on my job, damn, I sucked at it 

Nice, so you're a white hat hacker 

Still don't know exactly what path I'm going to take after finishing the college, but back-end programming and security stuff are my favorite ATM.