| | Many books take the approach of creating a complete application, building small parts of the whole in each chapter. This method can be useful to the writer because it helps to tell a story and keep continuity between chapters. However, I have elected not to take this approach, mostly because I usually find that such projects have little application in my work. Instead, I've opted to provide a series of smaller projects that, while they may have little direct application to your projects, contain code and ideas that you may be able to reuse. A few of the projects are included simply to illustrate a point rather than because they're useful in their own right—sometimes it's easier to see the reasoning behind code if you can strip it down to the essentials rather than try to make it do something useful. | | |