"Sean Kelly" <s...@invisibleduck.org> wrote in message news:guip5e$i9...@digitalmars.com... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> >> Cons: I've never been much of a fan of them. Rarely look at them, and >> never do them. But more than that, I find opening a book and seeing of >> bunch of "exercises" and "end of chapter quizzes" rather off-putting. > > I have a few books I bought largely for reference material where stuff was > omitted and left as an exercise to the reader (I'm looking at you, > Sedgewick!) Regardless of how easy some of these exercises may be for me > to solve, it isn't something I'm generally in the mood for when I pick up > the book at work to check something. However, this isn't a book about > algorithms so perhaps this isn't an issue really.
Maybe I'm contradicting my own original point here, but I actually did buy a book once where exercises were actually the entire point of the book (it does have solutions). It's called "Find The Bug", and has source for a bunch of functions in various languages, each one with a hidden bug to find (obviously). Many of them basically point out "gotchas" in the langauges (IIRC, C, Python, and maybe Java and something else). It sounded kind of neat, like a "programmer's puzzle book". Although I still haven't actually gotten around to it though. It's sitting there in my ever-growing pile of "stuff to read...someday".