Sunday, August 21, 2005

O say can you C++?

Some time ago, a fellow contributor was interested in learning to program. I offered him a book of programs, and copies of most of the stuff I'd written, but I don't think he got what he wanted from it. Then, we all forgot about it, and a lot of time passed.

Lately, I've been delving into programming again, and revisiting some things that I've written before in an effort to either reuse them or improve them. As part of this, I (finally, after over 5 years) went through the Wrox Press C++ Tutorial that came with my copy of Visual C++. I've got to say that it was very helpful, although as someone who already knew a lot of the material, I can't say just how helpful it would be to a beginner. Also, there were some stylistic things that they did that I disagree with, like putting endlines at the beginning of lines instead of at the end or prefixing all pointer variables with a 'p', and some language issues that I had with them, like not using built in .h headers (this reflects a difference between C and ANSI C++, and since I was taught to use the .h headers whenever available and the .h headers are better for backward compatibility with C, I still use them).

My point is that it was a very helpful tutorial, and if any of you out there have a copy of Visual C++ 6.0 and still want to learn some programming, give it a shot. I can provide some extra help if you get stuck, and even provide some code examples if you need it. In fact, I've been meaning to write an entry here about fractals, which would include pictures of fractals and also copies of my code used to generate them. I'm glad that I haven't done that yet, because a lot of that code has been revised and cleaned up lately.

On another note, are we going to try for a Labor Day-ish LAN party, or wait until Constitution Day, Columbus Day, Halloween, Veterans Day, or some other holiday?

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