[mattmanser]

I at least disagree with you. I found they helped me from moving from novice to proficient. That was quite a few years ago tho and I wonder how much increasing CPU has meant you don't hit the ceiling of brute force taking excessively long, which forced you to program more elegant solutions.

What I found most appealing about them is that they're a 1/2 hour task at most, nice bite-sized challenges.

And from what I remember, admittedly only doing the first 20 or 30, while some of it was mathematical manipulation it also forced you to do things you might not be so comfortable with, like recursion or even simple things like storing the primes in an array so you didn't have to check all the numbers again.

It also made me feel more confident when the 'ideal' solution was either the same or practically the same as mine. And invariably if it wasn't you'd learn a new language trick.

Then again I was always very comfortable with maths and would invariably spot any mathematical manipulation 'trick' immediately, so perhaps I'm a bit of an outlier. Although I never went past A-Level standard (18).

[barrkel]

I'm pretty comfortable in maths too (e.g. I never scored below 98% in any of my college exams in mathematical areas), but my point is that the problems are not programming focused, rather, they tend towards being mathematics focused.

[jsomers]

I think jlees makes an excellent point, that PE manages to bridge the gap between the basic "hello world" stuff and the more "algorithmic-y" aspects of programming. In my case that was what really got me snowballing toward being a reasonably capable coder.

I do think you have to be excited about discrete math to really plow through the problems, but the nice thing is, discrete math is the easiest kind of math to get hooked on, just because it's not much more than fancy counting.