What are some of the common programming tasks you work with in Real world?

Writing tests- you should write tests for anything which you wouldn't want to fail so this should be the most common task.

Prompting the user for input. Fetching the input. Validating for type: Is it a number? Is it a date?

• Database access, CRUD
• SOAP/Web Services
• Sorting, searching, and otherwise manipulating collections of objects

These are the first things that come to mind.

I voted up the question to even you out on the down vote rep hit; I don't particularly like list questions but some do help build better programmers and I think this is one of those.

There's a neat idea of this written by some guy name Dave (I looked I couldn't find is last name) called CodeKata. It's about various exercises that help you become better at understanding the principles and theories behind how to program.

Things like these are covered there.

• Supermarket pricing
• Data Munging
• Reviewing

Here's my own list of items as well.

• Learn how to use arrays (especially how to mitigate their downsides)
• LEARN REGULAR EXPRESSIONS ASAP! if you can even become a regex acolyte, you'll be FAR ahead of the pack.