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Re: [LUG] boost anyone

 

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010, Gibbs wrote:

On 16/12/10 08:58, tom wrote:
On 15/12/10 22:05, Simon Williams wrote:
On 15/12/10 13:16, tom wrote:
Anyone used boost much? I'm trying to find intros that dont assume you
already know what your doing...

Depends which bit you're trying to use it for. Searching for a boost tutorial is like trying to search for a tutorial for the standard C library. It doesn't really work like that.

OK perhaps I should say looking for example uses that dont make some Boost libs look like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist other than ideologically. There's a lot of 'you do it like this' but no 'why you don't do it like that' which for me is often the clue to the whole thing.

This is why I've struggled learning C in general (although I have a decent book at the moment and am getting there slowly). There seems to be a big gap between "basic" and "advanced" information that isn't filled or explained. You are expected to be one or the other and my learning always stagnates. I want to know how things work otherwise I would stick with Python, Perl etc etc.

I've no idea what Boost is, but I did learn C a long time ago - bit of a trial by fire as my first project was to fix some bugs and modify 'lpd' on an early Unix v6 system nearly 30 years ago...

However I'd already done a lot of work in Pascal before that (as you did back then!) And FORTRAN, etc.

You ought to have a copy of "K&R" for reference - probably the ANSI version, since even embedded compilers all support ANSI to some level these days.

I've always found that learning by example is good - so if you can get some relatively simple C program to start with and look at, then it might help... Not sure what though - most of the Linux/Unix stuff is going to be nothing more than a wrapper round system calls, etc. and it's all bloated beyond belief in recent years too )-:

Gordon

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