“How do I improve my programming skills” is an incredibly easy question to answer. The answer, of course, is practice. It is almost impossible to improve your programming skills without doing lots of coding.
Instead of writing code from scratch, one easy way to get you started is to modify some existing code.
Rewriting code is not something scientific. It is about achieving the purposes you want to achieve. There can be many alternatives for performing the same task. In any case, along the process you will be practicing your coding skills, hopefully in a not-so-boring way.
These are our Learn-by-rewrite exercise books for programming languages:
http://languagepress.net/wpnew/?cat=22
