I usually do the following. Note that it reflects my personal needs in programming, so YMMV, but in general I think it presents a sound approach. It is all done

I usually do the following. Note that it reflects my personal needs in programming, so YMMV, but in general I think it presents a sound approach. It is all done after you've learned the basics, of course, such as went through a few tutorials or a book. * Write a program that does a recursive directory traversal doing something with each file. Once without using any considerable library support (only open directory, list directory, etc.), and once trying to find a library to do it (such as the os.walk call in Python) * Write a small recursive-descent parser for arithmetic expressions, with a regex-based lexer. * Create a simple GUI with a few buttons and boxes * Create a small multi-threaded application using producer/consumer or something else. * Write a simple socket client-server pair and let them talk on localhost. Then rewrite it using a popular library for the language. * Find out how to create a distributable .exe for Windows in this language * Find out how to call functions from a C DLL in this language.