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Each challenge has been written in a broad view to cater to any coding language and operating system you choose to use. How you build your solution is up to you. Pick a challenge that suits you and try to build your application to the requirements.

Build a simple phone book where you can save a person’s name and number to a file (phonebook.txt) on your computer. When the application starts it should prompt the user with some options:

• Save new contact

• Show all contacts

• Find contact by name

• Delete contact by name

Saving a contact should add the details of the new contact to the phonebook.txt file. If that contact already existed, then update the number only.

Show all contacts must retrieve all the contacts saved in phonebook.txt and display the names and numbers of each. If there are not contacts in the file then display a ‘Phone book is empty‘ message.

When searching for a contact by name, display the number if the contact was found. If not then display a ‘Contact not found‘ message.

Deleting a contact should remove only the contact with the provided name. If there was no contact found with that name then display a ‘No contact to delete by that name‘.

We all know and love the word game, hangman. When your application starts the user should be prompted to enter a secret word. The secret word can only contain letters (A-Z & a-z). No spaces, numbers or special characters should be allowed as input. Once the user has entered their secret word, they must press Enter to confirm. For example, ‘Hello‘.

The second question asked to the user must be, ‘Enter how many lives‘. The user must then enter a number greater than zero. Only numbers are allowed. The user must press Enter to confirm. For example, 10. The player is then presented with their number of lives and the secret word as underscores for each character. For example, (Lives: 10) ‘_ _ _ _ _‘.

The player is asked to enter a single letter and press Enter to confirm. The application will check the entered letter against each character of the secret word. This check must be done in a case-insensitive way. Meaning if the user entered a lower case ‘h‘, the application must still match this against the upper case ‘H‘. The user will then be displayed with the updated text of, (Lives: 10) ‘H _ _ _ _‘.

If the user enters a letter that isn’t part of the secret word for example ‘a’ they should lose a life point. The missed letter ‘a’ must be shown to the player for the remainder of the game. For example, (Lives: 9) ‘H _ _ _ _’ -> (a).

This will continue until either the player has successfully guessed the secret word, or run out of life points. The message displayed in either outcome is up to you.

If you would prefer to start with the basics you can build a word and letter counter. When the application starts it must prompt the user for a letter or word to search for. Once entered the application will then prompt the user for the text to search over.

The application will scan over the string of text entered by the user and count the number of occurrences found. The answer will then be displayed back to the user.

This is the easiest challenge and if you would like to add to it feel free to do that. Some suggestions could be:

• Count the number of vowels

• Allow the user to search for multiple letter(s) / word(s)

• Display the entered text with each word written backward

• Group all unique words and display the sum of each

Good luck and have fun.