Prerequisites

The Goals page describes what students can expect to learn from this course. It’s just as important to think about what the entrance requirements are. The rough guide we’re using is this: if you can solve the two problems below using any programming language at all, you’re ready.

Problem 1: Finding the Largest Zero Neighbor

Write a function that takes a list or array of numbers as input and return the largest number that is adjacent to a zero. For example, if the input is:

[1, 5, 3, 0, 2, 7, 0, 8, 9, 1, 0]

the output is 8.

Problem 2: Reorganizing Files

Write a program that reads in a file containing an NxM array of numbers, transposes the array, and writes the result back to the original file. The numbers in each row are separated by one or more space characters; you don’t know in advance how many rows or columns there are, but you do know that every row is supposed to contain the same number of values. For example, if the original file contains:

1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

then your program should replace it with:

1 5
2 6
3 7
4 8