2007-10-06
My book on Python and Qt programming -- which has always been plagued by availability problems and a publisher who managed to fail to get it into Amazon -- is finally obsolete: Mark Summerfield's Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt has just been published by Prentice Hall. I haven't read it, but I'm quite confident that it'll be an excellent book.
2006-12-27
Bjarne Stroustrup
Since October 2003 I have learned to appreciate the C++ programming language. In fact, the better I get acquainted with C++, the more I like it. So, after having read Practical C++ by Ouailline, C++ in a Nutshell by Lischmer, Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo and a few others, and after having touched half a million lines of C++, I thought it time to go to the master for instruction.
Which is why I bought a second hand copy of The Design and Evolution of C++, and later also The C++ Programming Language. Even though it's an old book, dating back to 1994 (stone age, practically, no mention of Java or Python in this book), TDaEoC++ was exactly right for me. I like reading the combination of a historical treatment and a discussion per "feature" or "problem area" much more than a language specification or a tutorial-style book. I feel I've got a much better understanding of why things are the way they are in C++.
Of course, it's also an advantage that Stroustrup is a clear and entertaining author: not too dry, but not trying to be overly funny either. If I wanted to niggle I'd say that Stroustrup is a little too defensive, although that's understandable given the flak that C++ has been getting since its inception.
2006-04-24
In Krita 2.0, we will be using OpenGL much more than we already do in Krita 1.5, so I need to learn. When ordering the two basic books, OpenGL Programming Guide and OpenGL Shading Language. But Amazon then gave me Open Source Game Development Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows as a related choice.
I was a bit surprised: a whole book on coding games for KDE? But, well, it had an introductory chapter on OpenGL, and I thought that might help me ease into the topic.
It turns out this book is a really excellent, well-written concise and clear introduction to coding for KDE. Not just for coding games, but the whole thing. The ideal beginners introduction for people who are interested in coding for KDE. Of course, it doesn't deal with CMake yet, although there is quite decent coverage of Qt4. And the OpenGL chapter is just what I needed, too.
2005-06-23
Hibernate in Action is a really, really good book. In my previous life as a Python hacker I have spent quite a few evenings hacking together an object/relational mapping framework much like hibernate, only in python. This book starts with a very good, very thorough, very clear introduction to the whole problem of mapping objects to relational databases. The remaining chapters are clear, concise, well-paced and well-written, too. My next book on a Java topic is going to be a Manning book, too.
It's a bit of a pity then that Hibernate is a typical Java library. It comes with a slew of dependencies, it needs ant, but doesn't build out of the box. The readme isn't accurate enough to fix that, you need to go to the faq to find out which libs are missing... Oh, well, I'm going to try to port a Java app I've just finished to Hibernate anyway, to see if it works.
2005-01-31
This dissertation (which you can download from the author's website) is the single most important advance in digital art since the first paint application by Shoup. In contrast with earlier academic work, like Curtis and Salesin on water colour painting, or Cockshott on oil paint simulation or any of the other research papers published and collected in volumes like Non-Photorealistic Rendering (Gooch and Gooch), Bill Baxter has not just investigated his topic and written some text, but he has created a real, usable, interactive application that has been tested by actual artists. The other researchers have never reached that stage -- well, maybe we should count Raph Levien's Wet Dream, which is derived from Curtis et al.
2005-01-19
Malcolm Tundle Cockshott
I got a PDF copy of the microfiched version of this 1991 dissertation from the website of Bill Baxter, where you can also find his own dissertation. This is one of the first works on making painting on the computer something approaching real painting, with real viscous, thick paint.
2003-11-28
When I bought a Wacom tablet my intention was to use it to sketch maps for my novel-in-progress. Quite soon I discovered that it came with an application that purported to imitate, simulate or fake real artist's media, like charcoal, paint and ink.