One of the first programs I tried to write in C++ (my first language) was a chess game. I eventually hacked it together, but it wasn't pretty. The hardest par

One of the first programs I tried to write in C++ (my first language) was a chess game. I eventually hacked it together, but it wasn't pretty. The hardest part for me was learning the patterns necessary to do anything, and specifically to do it remotely well. For example maybe one of the exercises could be some kind of board game, where you demonstrate how you translate "the ideas" into "the C code"? For example just because you know that a Knight can move two-plus-one spaces doesn't mean you have any idea where that code should be inserted into the program's structure, or how to write it in such a way where you avoid overrunning an array. (The naive solution would crash when the Knight tries to move off the board.) Translating ideas -> C code was easily my hardest task when I was first starting out.