Effective way of practicing?

[Steve25]

I'm trying to learn mostly VB .NET and C++ at the moment as some web languages. But this is mostly for VB and C++, what is an effective way of practicing what you have learnt? I tried looking for some example projects that i can do to kind of get used to programming and stuff but i can't seem to find any and i'm not very good at making up scenarios myself. Anyone have any ideas?

[PeejAvery]

One of the basic reasons why programming exists is because of people's need to make a computer accomplish a task to save them time. Think of things that take time for you. You can practice by making applications that save you time by doing those tasks.

[Twey]

If you can't think of anything to make, you can be sure other people will need stuff done for them. Try helping out around Web forums or IRC language help channels.

[Steve25]

Thanks for your replies. To be honest i don't think i'm good enough to offer my services to someone else i just want something that i can try to make to get better.

[dglienna]

Read some articles. Quite a few of the long-timers around here have written articles. Anyone is free to submit them for review as well. You can pick something you are interested in, and then try it out.

[Twey]

Don't worry — there are always plenty of newbie questions that even you can help with. Just be careful: if you don't know the answer then don't just guess. Try to find out the answer with Google or a book if you can — that way you both learn — but don't give answers that you think might be right without noting that ‘I'm not really sure, but...’. That can help, of course, especially on fast-moving mediums like IRC where you can use it as a step to help walk the person through debugging their code, but the most insidious ones to look out for are those where it seems to work, but it's not doing what you think it is. The user can happily take your recommendation, but end up with an incomplete understanding of the problem that will come back to bite them later on.