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rbwhitaker / CSharpPlayersGuideEarlyAccess

A place to track issues with the C# Player's Guide for patches and future editions
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Revisit the challenges in the Catacombs of the Class's first chamber #669

Closed rbwhitaker closed 1 year ago

rbwhitaker commented 2 years ago

Some of the challenges in the Catacombs of the Class seemed like a better idea at the time than they do now. This issue is here to make sure I spend some time thinking about if they need to be revised or replaced.

The Point. This one, I mostly like. I don't see too many people struggling with it, and making a simple Point class seems like a good start. Though I do wonder about providing some guidance on the output ("Display these points on the console window in the format (x, y) to illustrate the class works.")

The Color. I see more people struggle with this one, but I still mostly like it.

The Card. This one has some issues. In particular, making a card instance is not too bad, but the expectation that you create a whole deck has given a lot of people trouble. People don't know how to iterate through all of the options in the enumeration. And that's something that must either be addressed in the enumeration chapter, removed, or a hint needs to be provided.

The Locked Door. This is another one people struggle with, and even when they solve it, the code is often tightly intertwined with console inputs, which I'd probably discourage. So this one maybe needs a bit more guidance but is otherwise okay.

The Password Validator: This one is usually okay. I like that it has a bit of complexity to it, from an algorithm standpoint. It leads to lots of good discussions about performance and things like that. But again, people keep lumping user input in with the rest of the class, and I think they'd have better designs if they didn't. But this is a recurring theme that I'm doing other things to try to help with. So maybe I leave this alone for now...

rbwhitaker commented 1 year ago

The challenges in the Catacombs of the Class were completely redone. Rather than having five challenges to make a single class, followed by three where you come up with a design, followed by Tic-Tac-Toe, the Catacombs is now structured in a way that just has you build three small programs. One calculates damage to a hero based on where the hit lands and whether or not the hero has armor there, and if so, the type of armor. Another is a themed Rock-Paper-Scissors. And the last is a newly-themed Tic-Tac-Toe. So it still culminates in Tic-Tac-Toe, but de-emphasizes CRC cards in favor of more actual, working programs.