I thought this sounded interesting considering how popular poker is these days (you know who you are): PHP Editors is holding a PHP programming contest for a Texas Holdem game. I might try it out. It wouldn’t be anything like most commercial poker sites out there, but it would be an interesting programming project.
…Not unlike being back in school, writing a program for whatever computer course I’d be in. Those were the days; they were still teaching Pascal at the time. I remember writing a Hangman game (it mostly sucked), and an algorithm for storing shuffling a deck of cards (which might have been a precursor for a poker program).
Of course, handling and “shuffling” a deck of cards that only exists in a computer program is trivial. You simply need to have a structure representing the cards, and draw them randomly. (And a method for keeping track of what’s been drawn.) Each subsequent “shuffle” is simply a different random number set selecting the cards.
In jr. high school, if we were really good and finished our work early, we got to use the school’s one computer & play on the word processor. Remember those days? DOS prompts and black screens with orange letters?
I never learned PHP. Is it fun?
Oh yes, I remember the old-school stuff. (Though I had a Commodore 64 growing up, myself.) The junior high had Apple IIs and Commodore Pets, while the high school only had Apple IIs. At least you had PCs. 🙂
PHP is fun, yes, and enormously useful. A good skill to have… I could recommend a few books, if you like.
No, I don’t have time for that. I just got my copy of Flash in the mail — I need to play with that a bit first! Thanks though.