I usually prescribe the same sequence for anyone who wants to learn programming. It's very theoretical, but it lays a good foundation. It should take three or four months of fulltime study, but programming isn't something you learn overnight.If you can't get through this sequence, you're not going to be able to program, so you might as well give up now.Code, by Charles Petzold.The C Programming Language, K&RThe Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelson and Sussman.My rule is: work your way through those three books by sheer force, if necessary. Ask any questions you have, ...

My good friend Brent Simmons invokes a historical email from Linus Torvalds, about his disdain for C++C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it.Brent affirms his support while paying homage to plain-old C:But I will admit to an enduring love of C. I still think of C not as C but as the language.I loved C. Emphasis on the past-tense. As object-oriented programming concepts became popular, those of us who were programming in C or simi...

What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types is obviously correct for a class of type bugs. Code using purity (no mutable references or side effects) isobviously correct for a class of concurrency bugs. When I take advantage of any of these techniques, I don...

new = old[:]Those proficient in Python know what the previous line do. It copies the list old into new. This is confusing for beginners and should be avoided. Sadly the [:] notation is widely used, probably because most Python programmers don’t know a better way of copying lists.A little bit of pythonic theoryFirst we need to understand how Python manages objects & variables. Python doesn’t have variables like C. In C a variable is not just a name, it is a set of bits; a variable exists somewhere in memory. In Python variables are just tags ...

A small company called AppMobi is enabling developers to create HTML5 apps that tap into native hardware and OS capabilities of mobile devices, such as gravity sensing, accelerometer, GPS, camera, sound and vibration, and the file system, InfoWorld reports. 'Its MobiUs browser for iOS implements HTML5's DirectCanvas API for gaming, as well as the HTML5 local storage API for saving executables and data in the browser cache so that apps can run offline. But what makes MobiUs more than just yet another browser is the set of libraries AppMobi provides app developers to access native hardware ...

In the summer of 2006 a work buddy, George, has told me that I could make some extra money programming on a site named Rent A Coder. I’ve signed up the same day. After losing some time on a project that never started I lost my interest in “coding for money”. I almost forgot about RAC.Fast-forward two years, I was a PhD student at a small North American University with a student visa and … nothing else in my pockets. For a few months I was able to make a living from a scholarship until they forgot to pay me for about two months. Oh, the delights of eating only rice...

For the past year or so my wife has been taking online classes to get a computer science degree. For most of her classes she’s done great, she’s been flying through HTML and SQL, even up to the point where she can handle multilevel joins and optimizing through indexes. That was until she hit her vb.net class. I had no idea why she was having problems with a language has easy as vb.net so I started helping her out and find out why she was having so many problems. I’ve also added some recommendations in case you have the same problems, hopefully these will help you out. (Nam...

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types something like (I’ll be intentionally skipping some #include boilerplate):typedef s...