Solving the exercises

Almost every chapter has an Exercises section at the end. These exercises are designed to give you ideas for how you continue practicing what you've learned. They have already been solved in the GitHub repository so you can see how I've solved them. The next chapter always starts from the point where I've solved the exercises.

Should you choose to solve the exercises—which I encourage you to do—then the likelihood is that you'll have solved them in a different way than I would have. Unfortunately, this might leave you in merge hell when you begin the next chapter.

If you find yourself in this situation, I suggest you first study the differences between your approach and mine. Think about how they differ and the relative merits of each. (Do not think that mine will be any better than yours.)

Then, ensuring you've committed and successfully stored your code, move to a new tag and a new branch, starting again.

In other words, be pragmatic and don't spend an inordinate amount of time fighting the system. It's better to keep moving and not get stuck or frustrated.

Pro tip: always keep your exercise solutions in a separate commit. When you move on to the next chapter, branch from your pre-Exercises commit and merge in the official exercise solutions instead.