Summary

Often, programming books give you a lot of wordy background, but don't include enough actual code examples for how to do stuff. While I won't claim that this book shirks on the wordy background (you might snicker now), this lesson—and the two to come on Day 14 and Day 21—will offer you some longer bits of code that make use of the techniques you've learned in the previous lessons, put them all together, and maybe even accomplish some sort of useful task (although I'm not certain how often you're going to need to spell a number.)

In today's lesson, we explored three scripts. First, a revision of the familiar stats script, printed a sophisticated histogram using for loops and some careful measuring. The second, a number speller, used tests and a hash lookup to print a result. And the third, webbuild, took an input file from the command line and data from the keyboard and converted the contents of the file into something else—in this case, a Web page.

Congratulations on completing the first week of this three-week book. During this week, you've picked up a hefty chunk of the language. From this point on, we'll be building on what you've already learned. Onward to Week 2!