[–] captbrogers 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
It's a great question but there is a caveat to it: what platform are you aiming at?
Which of the following applies:
Here are my two credits worth of thoughts on each.
On the desktop I'd go for a calculator. It can be as simple as basic arithmetic to more advanced features like graphing output on a formula using a GUI library.
A website, either desktop or mobile, do a blog. Not just any blog, but one written using object-oriented code. Do role-based permissions, repository patterns, events, JSON (or XML) API, handling uploads, etc. Can be done with or without a framework.
Mobile apps I'm not really well versed on a concept that would be great to cover basics of each. For that, someone else will have to chime in.
[–] codioBunny 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Similar to tic-tac-toe, writing Blackjack is also a good one. You can make it as simple or complex as you like: start off with just text-based and then create a UI for it.
[–] wunderlust ago
Writing a basic infix to postfix converter, or a small calculator. A lot of string manipulation, function modularity, file I/O, basic dictionary/array data structures.
I usually do two things after "Hello, World". First, I check that I can perform simple mathematical operations. Second, I check that I can open files, read from them and write to them.
[–] mikwaheeri 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
One simple idea that I like is writing a little program to open commonly used files instead of manually navigating and double clicking. It touches on basic GUI use (creating a window & some buttons) as well as using built-in OS operations. This obviously doesn't cover a very wide range of features, but still could prove somewhat useful if expanded upon.