I've noticed similarities in these assignments to others in classes, tutorials, and hearing non-Cattle Drive students discussions.
There most likely are standard assignments that almost all programming books/classes go through because these are just well known methods for teaching a certain concept. How many times have you a read a book that started out with "Hello World!" (or some derivative)?
For instance, in my
EJB class we have to write a program where users can check out, add, remove, etc. books from a library. Pretty much our
JDBC assignments, except as videos.