After reading several good reviews of the book "Talent Code" (among others, the review on Derek Sivers' blog)
I decided to give the book a shot. One thing that intrigued me was the information that supposedly, Brazilian soccer players practice futsal (a game similar to soccer, with a smaller field, fewer players, and a smaller, heavier ball) as this game "compresses soccer's essential skills into a small box" and allows the players to improve their soccer skills faster compared with practicing soccer.The book also mentions the "Blue box" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer)
as a practice device of similar nature for piloting airplanes.
So the question is obvious, is there something similar for programming? The only thing I can think of are competitions such as Project Euler but I somehow feel that these are not exactly "Blue boxes".