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Posts Tagged ‘development’

Objective-C Breaking it down

// July 25th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Objective-C

It has been a week since I started this adventure of learning a new programming language. Objective-C is interesting to say the least. My first experience with this language did not go so well. I think it had to do with the bias I had about it. You know, things I hear from friends, and how the language had ugly syntax. After working with it and learning a lot of what Objective-C had to offer. One thing that I like about Objective-C is that capability to directly code in C. Hence, if you ever come to a situation where you needed to improve execution time, you can code critical sections of your code based with C!

The OO features are also very powerful. Everything from categories to selectors to protocols are cool concepts. I will post about these features in future posts. The part that annoyed people the most is how you invoke and define methods, but this grows on you as you program.

I wrote a post about documenting my learning adventure, but I now take it back. There will be too many assumptions I would have to make to explain everything. Also, there is simply to much to the language to post about. Instead I will start a simple project to get as much development time with the language as I can. This is the project that I will post about. Using the example, I will post about some important concepts of Objective-C.

I have decided to make tic-tac-toe. I will purposely try to use as many features of the languages as I can. So stay tuned until the next post. Also if anyone has questions concerning the language, let me know I would love to hunt down the answer, it helps me learn :)

Python is Kick Ace

// April 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // development

Python is a scripting language that can be used in many different way. Python is super easy to learn and can take you far in the professional world. Big names like Google use this language heavily for a lot of their day to day operations. A good example is their App Engine.

I picked up Python over night just by going to the Python Home page and following their tutorials. The documentation is excellent, so if you can read, I assume you can, then you should be good to go. The tutorial I follow is located at http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html.

Python can be used for many things a popular usage for this scripting language is developing with Game engines, or 3D modeling software packages like Blender.  Once you have gone through the tutorials, I recommend you get this pocket reference book below. It proves to be very useful, because there are so many libraries, and a quick look up can make life a lot easier.

python_ref_3ed_comp.indd

I started learning Python when I was an undergrad to develop some code for a summer research position I had. My job was to develop an API to integrate a huge virtual environment with a 3D game engine called Panda3D. The API was called HIVE (Huge Immersive Virtual Environment). If you have any questions about Python or done anything cool with the language just leave a comment and let me know :-)

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