java-exercism-exercises/bird-watcher/HINTS.md

Hints

General

• The bird count per day is stored in a field named birdsPerDay.
• The bird count per day is an array that contains exactly 7 integers.

1. Check what the counts were last week

• As we keep the last week we just need to return the last week values.

2. Check how many birds visited today

• Remember that the counts are ordered by day from oldest to most recent, with the last element representing today.
• Accessing the last element can be done either by using its (fixed) index (remember to start counting from zero) or by calculating its index using the array's size.

3. Increment today's count

• Set the element representing today's count to today's count plus 1.

4. Check if there was a day with no visiting birds

• The array can be iterated over using a for loop.
• Another solution is to use the Java Stream Api.

5. Calculate the number of visiting birds for the first number of days

• A variable can be used to hold the count for the number of visiting birds.
• The array can be iterated over using a for loop.
• The variable can be updated inside the loop.
• Remember: arrays are indexed from 0.

6. Calculate the number of busy days

• A variable can be used to hold the number of busy days.
• The array can be iterated over using a foreach loop.
• The variable can be updated inside the loop.
• A conditional statement can be used inside the loop.