Is that im having trouble practicing problems. Even if I decide to practice the problems from my C++ book, they dont give any idea of the way the solution(program) should look like, so that I may compare to see if my program is similar in anyway. My book gives me to many generic "Write a program to do "this" " projects without really showing a concrete example of what "this" really is. In other words How Do I Know That I did "that".

One problem in my book said to write a program that calculates the sales tax on a given item?????

First of all slase tax differs on state(whats the state,) whats the item(a house, a dog,) How can I check this to see if im right. Programming books dont have answer keys! I know that there is no ABSOLUTE answer, thats just silly, programs can be written in many ways, but a sample of what one would look like based of the difficulty of the problem would really help!

Is there a solution to this, maby a book that has worked out examples for the problems they give , or online sources that do something similar.(is there such thing as a programming book with an answer key?)