15 exercises to learn a new programming language

I have always found reading a particular book to learn a new programming language pretty boring. I have always thought, programming language books are only to be referred. As such, the best way learn a programming language would be implement a project, and learn on the fly.

In web development, the way to do it would be to implement 'Shopping Cart' application, it covers all the aspects of web development from databases to sessions!.

On the other hand, to learn a programming language alone(without getting fussy about UI), I feel, the following exercises are to be implemented to get the basics of the language right. Here they are(taken from here)..

1. “Display series of numbers (1,2,3,4, 5….etc) in an infinite loop. The program should quit if someone hits a specific key (Say ESCAPE key).”
2. “Fibonacci series, swapping two variables, finding maximum/minimum among a list of numbers.”
3. “Accepting series of numbers, strings from keyboard and sorting them ascending, descending order.”
4. “Reynolds number is calculated using formula (D*v*rho)/mu Where D = Diameter, V= velocity, rho = density mu = viscosity Write a program that will accept all values in appropriate units (Don’t worry about unit conversion) If number is <>
5. “Modify the above program such that it will ask for ‘Do you want to calculate again (y/n), if you say ‘y’, it’ll again ask the parameters. If ‘n’, it’ll exit. (Do while loop) While running the program give value mu = 0. See what happens. Does it give ‘DIVIDE BY ZERO’ error? Does it give ‘Segmentation fault..core dump?’. How to handle this situation. Is there something built in the language itself? (Exception Handling)”
6. “Scientific calculator supporting addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square-root, square, cube, sin, cos, tan, Factorial, inverse, modulus”
7. “Printing output in different formats (say rounding up to 5 decimal places, truncating after 4 decimal places, padding zeros to the right and left, right and left justification)(Input output operations)”
8. “Open a text file and convert it into HTML file. (File operations/Strings)”
9. “Time and Date : Get system time and convert it in different formats ‘DD-MON-YYYY’, ‘mm-dd-yyyy’, ‘dd/mm/yy’ etc.”
10. “Create files with date and time stamp appended to the name”
11. “Input is HTML table. Remove all tags and put data in a comma/tab separated file.”
12. “Extract uppercase words from a file, extract unique words.”
13. “Implement word wrapping feature (Observe how word wrap works in windows ‘notepad’).”
14. “Adding/removing items in the beginning, middle and end of the array.”
15. “Are these features supported by your language: Operator overloading, virtual functions, references, pointers etc.”

If you're learning Ruby, then this has possible solutions to all the above problems.