blake41

A friend of mine runs a company called Wildcard.  I recently did their wildcard challenge and it was a lot of fun and a I think would be a good excercise to really stretch your Ruby skills.

http://www.trywildcard.com/challenge

Create a repo called stretch in your github.
Create a folder called wildcard in that repo.
Create folders in wildcard called problem1 and problem2.

You'll most likely need to use classes to do this although I know at least problem 1 can be solved without.
This will test your knowledge of string manipulation, objects and mainly iteration.

blake41

# prereqs arrays, methods, conditional logic
# part I. implement a maximum method that takes and array and returns the largest element of the array
# part II. reimplement this method as an instance method on the array class

def maximum(arr)

end


# now rewrite this as a method on the array class

blake41

Implement your own versions of collect and select

def my_collect(array)
#code goes here
end

def my_select(array)
#
end

blake41

def my_each(array)
# iterates through an array
  # some kind of loop
  # yield access each element of the array
  # return the origin array
# yield to the block with each element in the array
# returns the original array
  i = 0
  while i < array.length
    yield array[i]

blake41

ITEMS = [  {"AVOCADO" => {:price => 3.00, :clearance_items => true}},
    {"AVOCADO" => {:price => 3.00, :clearance_items => true}},
    {"KALE" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"KALE" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BLACK_BEANS" => {:price => 2.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"ALMONDS" => {:price => 9.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"TEMPEH" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},
    {"CHEESE" => {:price => 6.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BEER" => {:price => 13.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"PEANUTBUTTER" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},

blake41

ITEMS = [  {"AVOCADO" => {:price => 3.00, :clearance_items => true}},
    {"KALE" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BLACK_BEANS" => {:price => 2.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"ALMONDS" => {:price => 9.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"TEMPEH" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},
    {"CHEESE" => {:price => 6.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BEER" => {:price => 13.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"PEANUTBUTTER" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},
    {"BEETS" => {:price => 2.50,:clearance_items => false}}]

blake41

require 'debugger'
ITEMS = [  {"AVOCADO" => {:price => 3.00, :clearance_items => true}},
    {"KALE" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BLACK_BEANS" => {:price => 2.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"ALMONDS" => {:price => 9.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"TEMPEH" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},
    {"CHEESE" => {:price => 6.50,:clearance_items => false}},
    {"BEER" => {:price => 13.00, :clearance_items => false}},
    {"PEANUTBUTTER" => {:price => 3.00,:clearance_items => true}},
    {"BEETS" => {:price => 2.50,:clearance_items => false}}]

blake41

Collections Practice

Finish the first collections assignment if you haven't already.

Wrap each of these problems in a method, you can also write a test for each method if you'd like to practice testing.  All solutions should be generic and work for any "case" but sometimes a sample case is given.

These problems should get progressively more difficult.

Return true if every element of the tools array starts with an "r" and false otherwise.
  tools = ["ruby", "rspec", "rails"]

blake41

# prereqs: iterators, hashes, conditional logic
# Given a hash with numeric values, return the key for the smallest value
def key_for_min_value(hash)
  # code goes here
end

blake41

One of the projects you can choose from this week is called the game of life

This is a classic problem you can do in any programming language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

This is a good tutorial on game of life and how to use the Gosu gem to create a visualization of your game of life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5fesJ3wM6s

This is a great project to practice TDD on although it will be hard until we cover mocking and stubbing (advanced testing techniques)