Christian got reinvigorated on his C++ Programming again this weekend. I think part of it was because Lorena and Kelly left us in the Barnes and Noble for four or five hours over two sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday morning, Kelly had a piano competition followed by her birthday shopping spree. We needed to have a second bookstore session, because Lorena and Kelly did not get to participate on the first one. Christian and I were not needed for either of those, so we situated ourselves in the nice easy chairs by the electrical connection in the corner of the store, bought our selves something to sip (hot cocoa for Christian, coffee for me), and programmed away.
I talked, previously, about the messiness of learning. C++ is definitely one of those topics that I learned in a very messy way. Fortunately, Christian has been through a lot of the messiness already. He spent most of a year learning C# so he has a pretty good handle on object oriented programming. In addition, he has had several false starts on the whole C++ topic. The were false starts mostly because we could not decide which programming environment he should use. We fooled around with several different ones, but finally settled on Visual Studio Express. We talked a little bit about precompiled headers, I helped him with an example program, and we were off and running. I think he worked his way through three full chapters of C++ Primer Plus. It is a great book.
If he keeps up a good pace, we really should try to do a micro-controller project this summer. I think it would be great to program something that includes a fountain with goldfish, a webcam, some motors, and a server to control and view it from the internet. We have an old spare computer and an I/O board we can use. I think we even have some stepper motors. We really enjoyed some goldfish we kept in a wooden half barrel. They are available at Home Depot. We could make something a little more elaborate this time.
I planned to get a new fuse for the multimeter we blew out last week when we were testing the ham radio, but we did not get around to it, what with Kelly’s birthday and all. We will have to wait until next week.
Hunter
Christian, you’re telling me you don’t drink coffee? You told me yourself: real men drink their coffee BLACK! 😉
It’s been so long since I dabbled in coding (that isn’t web related [smile]).
I spent some time in C and then switched over to Visual Basic… but then moved on to other endeavors. Keep up the great work!
~Luke
Luke, as a web guy you know there is so much minutiae with all this stuff, that a ton of time needs to be invested learning that before you can do anything real. I went just the opposite direction–I used to be able to write web stuff in perl, php, and python, but now all I can do is the low level stuff in c/c++.
All this is way over my head, but I wanted to just chime in and say that in spite of that, or maybe because of that, I am so impressed with your programming classes. I am afraid no one that graduates from here will know what c+ unless we are talking about a battery.
Lynn