11 exercises for evaluating a language or framework

Prashant lists 15 exercises for learning a new computer language. Here’s my 10-point approach (fair bit of overlap with Prashant’s):

(Hint to people writing documentation for their languages: cover these points and people will be able to get to work quickly with your creation. Sure there are lots of nooks and subtleties in every system, but unless people are quickly productive, they’ll probably not have the opportunity of mastering it.)

1. Open a text file, read line and split strings into columns
2. Use a debugger. Set breakpoints, inspect and change variables
3. Connect to a database
4. Read and write XML
5. Handle string encodings, Unicode conversion
6. Use language’s standard logging framework
7. Use language’s standard configuration framework
8. Collections - lists, hashtables. Check whether there are limitations on what can be keyed and valued
9. Handle exceptions, throw them
10. Familiarise with documentation layout, bookmark newsgroups, mailing lists, irc channels
11. Regular Expressions