Counting Words in Moby Dick

Moby Dick: Plot synopsis

Captain Ahab was vicious because Moby Dick, the white whale, had bitten off his leg. So the captain set sail for a hunt. For months he was searching the sea for the white whale. The captain finally attacked the whale with a harpoon. Unimpressed, the whale devoured captain, crew and ship. The whale won.

Video

Moby Dick short synopsis on Youtube

Course Objective

Herman Melville’s book “Moby Dick” describes the epic fight between the captain of a whaling ship and a whale. In the book, the whale wins by eating most of the other characters.

But does he also win by being mentioned more often?

In this course, you have a program that analyzes the text of Melville’s book.

You will test whether the program work correctly?

Why was this example selected?

Three main reasons:

• The implementation is simple enough for beginners.
• Counting words easily yields different results (because of upper/lower case, special characters etc). Therefore the program needs to be thoroughly tested.
• You can easily change the theme to another book from Project Gutenberg.