Fun – Clean C++

Hangman is a little game often played by pupils during math lessons without the teacher knowing. The rules are quite simple: The game master thinks of a word or phrase. The players try to guess the solution in a letter-by-letter fashion. For any bad guess, the game master adds another piece to a drawn gallows, complete with unfortunate hangman and other accessoires. When the gallows is fully constructed, the players lose. Obviously, players win if they are able to correctly solve the puzzle before.

Because of its simplicity, hangman is ideally suited for learning test-driven development or as a task for code dojos. Try to write classes and functions to handle the game logic. These features should be designed to be easily usable in an actual game application.

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Learning continuously is important in our rapidly changing business to avoid being outlived by the latest technology or style. I guess most of our readers come to clean-cpp.org because they are interested to learn something new about C++ they did not know before, or they like the good feeling to read that someone else thinks what they are already doing is right. Besides reading blogs and books, there are a few things one can do to stay up to speed:

Write a blog on your own. You would be surprised what you need to learn in order to write an article.
Visit talks or watch them on Youtube or other video platforms.
Join an open source community and start working on a project you like.
Learn a new programming language.
Browse through someone else’s code.
Talk to someone who is a better programmer than you are.

A code dojo is a relatively new practice of learning from another, and it combines some of the best features of above list. Basically, it is an informal gathering of programmers. Together, they write code to solve a fun task. They talk with each other, drink beer, and eat pizza. It is almost like a night out, but with more code.

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