Project book

[maniac]

Hello! I have been studying C++ for more that one year and a half and I know how to work with data structures and things like that including Classes. Can you recommend me a book that follows the steps of making a real life projects? I mean a book that is dedicated to creating a project like the ones that programmers are supposed to built. Not just like the little tasks that are given in the books. For example "Create a binary tree and do something with it". I know that data structures are important part of programming but these tasks are just a little pieces of code that is needed for a real life project.

[maniac]

Somebody?

[ajh32]

I found the Visual C++ books by Ivor Horton to be quite good. His books normally teach you different aspects of programming Visual C++ while writing the code for a single project throughout the book.

[mutexe]

i think you should approach this from the other direction.
put your books away, think of a project and code it.

write a game, or a tool to do something.

how much coding are you doing at the moment? 18 months is long time to just read.

[maniac]

I code a lot but mainly little projects. For example I have written a Sudoku Solver and Snake Game. Only the Snake Game is a bit advanced but it is also just a little code. Do you have any ideas about advanced projects? I wanted a book because I thought that there would be shown how a project looks like, what is it's strucure and stuff like that. But if you say that I need to do the things myself ok. Just suggest some good advanced projects that can't be written for half an hour :)

[ajh32]

How about a program that imports the lottery results from the lotto web-page, stores it in a database or xml file. Updates the data held for draws so far not downloaded. Calculates the balls it expects to be drawn for the next draw. Uses a GUI that shows each draw on balls like the lotto web page does.

[maniac]

Nice idea. It will also make me search information about how to download information from web page and save it in xml file. Thanks :)

[rodiongork]

I know it is a sin to say so, but C++ is not the best choice for such a program.

Throw few screenshots of your "snake" for us to see - perhaps it would be better for you to continue exercises with game projects. It is at least somewhat more funny :)

[maniac]

My snake game was on my old laptop but it crashed and I didn't make a copy somewhere else. I lost it :(. But it wasn't something special. It was in the console with ASCII symbols for the body and the other things..
When I start learning programming I was hoping one day to make a perogram that takes football/soccer scores from a web page and shows the to the user. Now I realise that it is not so hard. The only part that I don't know how to do is - How can I download an XML file. For example this: http://www.scorespro.com/rss2/live-soccer.xml . And how to parse it. Is it possible to do that using C++? If so, can you recommend me a good way to do it? :)

[ajh32]

You probably won't download an xml file from the site unless it has an API that will do this. Instead you will need to "extract" the data from the web-page, and then create an xml file from the raw data. I use libxml2 which I find gives me all the functionality that I require, MSXML doesn't provide all that I need for what I do. Anyway, unless you are going to re-invent the wheel and write your own xml library, then use a 3rd party xml library.