Programming Ideas

There are a lot of obstruction on the way of new programmer. If he or she is newbie and does not have access to real development process it means he or she does not have access to best practice and up-to-date knowledges about technologies, tools, approaches etc. But most substantial issue is lack interesting and useful task for practice and develop skills. So I have one proposal as choice to resolve that problem: be imitator.
Yeah. Just try to copy existing well knowing functionality or application. It is not new idea, I know, but it is not so obvious to use this method in every day. I have seen movie about some painter who trained to draw by copy another's picture. Let's contrive some examples:
- Calc
- Excel
- Lingvo
- TotalCommander
- Bizarre
- BlogSpot
- Eclipse
- gmail
- forum
- CMS
- game ..
Or only functionality:
- Java collection implementation
- Java ORM implementation
- java.lang.String implementation

And also some notes:

//---------------
System.out.println( new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MMM-dd hh:mm:ss").format(new Date()));
System.out.println( new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MMM-dd (E) hh:mm:ss [z]", Locale.ENGLISH).parse("2008-Jun-27 (Fri) 01:18:46 [EEST]"));
//---------------
new StringBuilder("qwerty").reverse().toString();
//---------------
public enum Status {
Open("O"), Closed("C"), Reopened("R");
final String code;
Status(String code) {
this.code = code;
}
}
//---------------