I solved another 17 problems on Project Euler today. I’ve not solved more than the average Ruby participant on the site. But Rubyists have a pretty low average ranking on that site compared with other languages like Python and C.
Kind of makes sense given the number-crunching nature of most of the […]

I’m about halfway through Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, and it’s pretty good. I can’t read Smalltalk very well, so that’s an impediment, but most of the code is C++ so it’s OK. The book itself is very well-written. The patterns are laid out in a clear and thorough format, […]

Thank you very much to numerodix’s latest blog entry, which caused me to pay extra attention when upgrading system packages this week. I do read my elogs, but I don’t read it as carefully as I should. I know I would have missed the warning about expat1 -> 2 necessitating a revdep-rebuild. […]

If only I had a dime for every time Stroustrup used the phrase “This would be disastrous”. It can refer to everything from misuse of pointers, to making your destructors non-virtual in a class that will be a base class for some derived class, to all sorts of other C++ pitfalls. I got […]

I’m almost done with The C++ Programming Language. My eyes started to glaze over when I hit the long drawn-out descriptions of some of the STL classes. It might be good as a reference but it doesn’t do much to keep me awake at 6:30 AM on the bus every morning. The […]

I’m up to Chapter 18 of Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language. The templates chapter was painful and I had to read it twice. I think I got it the second time through. Stroustrup talks about how people ask him how long it takes to learn C++ and he says (paraphrased) “a year […]

I’m done with 10 chapters of my new book so far. There’s some good stuff in there. I’m always glad when I get a book that makes me realize how little I actually know about something, because it’s probably a good sign I’m learning something.
Stroustrup makes some nice comments about interfaces. He […]

So as I alluded to after chattering on for hours, C++ is my new language of the week/month(/year?). My copy of The C++ Programming Language came in the mail a day early today, so I got to read it on the bus ride home from work, which was fun. I’ve apparently already read […]

I’ve been out of college almost exactly four years. Looking back at my Computer Science classes, I think I can see some ways that my education was woefully inadequate. Or at least not what I wish it would have been, knowing what I (hope I) know now.