Jacob Santos

A Little History

The reason I’m revisiting blackjack is because I have a C++ version and I want to port it to PHP, for fun. If you want to have a simple project for learning a language, other than “Hello World,” then Blackjack is a good project.

The reasoning is that Blackjack is pretty simple, has few rules, deals with pesky randomization (which was a bitch back before STL days (God I love STL), damn compiler bastards, except for Microsoft and GCC). Anyway, Blackjack teaches and allows practice for:

1. Randomization
2. Handling input and output
3. Looping
4. Conditional Statements
5. Procedural Programming (totally don’t want everything in Main)

Disclaimer: This code is from my friends project. I did Blackjack using OpenGL toolkit, it was crap, but was a great learning experience (even though I forgot most of what it was that I learned).

Guidelines

Procedural Programming

Okay, it is generally a bad idea to have everything in the main(), gets cluttered and just amateurish. For a project of this size, it is a good idea to break things down into reusable functions to help with debugging and development. It is also good practice.

Keeping it Simple

The friend’s project broke it down to the principle that the card was not important, but the value was. The only problem with this, was that you couldn’t say, deal an Ace and have it either equal 1 or 10. The nice thing was that it kept from building a deck, keeping track of the cards, and keeping track of the players hand. Good stuff and I would had spent a great deal of time building it to where there was a deck. The idea is quick and simple, so it is good stuff, no matter how much I disagreed with the implementation.

1. Intro

The intro states the games intention and gets the game started.

cout < < "Welcome to BlackJack!" <<endl <<endl;
cout << "Press Any Key to Start a Game." <<endl <<endl;
getch();

The interesting part worth noting is getch(), which gets a character for a variable. Since there is no variable, it will pause the console until one is pressed and then continue the execution. Nice trick!

echo "Welcome to Blackjack!\n\n";
echo "Press Any Key to Start a Game.\n\n";

fgetc(STDIN); // same effect as getch().

struct bjStats
{
    int wins;
    int loses;
    int draws;
} Stats = { 0, 0, 0 };

class Stats
{
    static public $wins = 0, $loses = 0, $draws = 0;
}

return(rand() % 10 + 1);

return mt_rand(1, 11);