Bitwise Magazine

A Little Course in C. Part 3 – Constants and #define

Getting started with C programming

Monday 18 November 2013

If you want to make sure that a value cannot be changed, you should declare a constant.

A constant is an identifier to which a value is assigned but whose value (unlike the value of a variable) should never change during the execution of your program. The traditional way of defining a constant is C is to use the preprocessor directive #define followed by an identifier and a value to be substituted for that identifier. Here, for example, is how I might define a constant named PI with the value 3.141593 #define PI 3.141593 In fact, the value of a constant defined in this way is not absolutely guaranteed to be immune from being changed by having a different value associated with the identifier. In C, the following code is legal (though your compiler may show a warning message): #define PI 3.14159 #define PI 55.5 Modern C compilers provide an alternative way of defining (...)

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A Little Course in C. Part 2 – Variables and Types

Getting started with C programming

Friday 15 November 2013

In C a variable is declared by stating its data-type (such as int for an integer variable or double for a floating-point variable) followed by the variable name. You can invent names for your variables and, as a general rule, it is best to make those names descriptive.

This is how to declare a floating-point variable named mydouble with the double data-type: double mydouble; You can now assign a floating-point value to that variable: mydouble = 100.75; Alternatively, you can assign a value at the same time you declare the variable: double mydouble = 100.75; Integers and Floats Now let's look at a program that uses integer and floating point variables to do a calculation. My intention is to calculate the grand total of an item by starting with its subtotal (minus tax) and then calculating the amount of tax due on it by multiplying that subtotal by the current tax rate. Here I'm assuming that tax rate to be 17.5% or, expressed as a floating point number, 0.175. Then I calculate the final price – the grand total – by adding the tax (...)

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All At C

The C swell gets ever higher

Wednesday 13 November 2013

You might think that an old language like C would long ago have bitten the dust.

After all, this language was created in the dim distant past of the late 1960s and early '70s. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles we've come to expect from modern languages. It has no Object Orientation, no garbage collection, it has very little in the way of modularity, it isn't 'visual', heck, it doesn't even have a string data-type. And yet C is the language that refuses to die. In fact, it is not even sickly, let alone close to death. Far from it. According to the Tiobe Index, which assesses the relative 'health' of (and demand for) programming language, C occupies the number 1 position. And, according to Infoworld, its lead over other languages is actually growing. Just after C in the Tiobe index comes Java - an OOP language based on C syntax. Then come Objective-C and (...)

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A Little Course in C. Part 1 – The Fundamentals

Getting started with C programming

Tuesday 12 November 2013

C is one of the most important of all programming languages It was first developed by Dennis Ritchie in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The C language is widely used for all kinds of programming: everything from general-purpose applications, programming language tools and compilers – even operating systems and hardware devices. The language also forms the basis of both C++ and Objective-C.

The C language is fast and efficient – but it can be hard to learn. This course aims to simplify the learning process. It is based on my eBook, The Little Book Of C, which is provided with my multimedia online course, C Programming For Beginners. This ‘Little Course' won't be as in-depth as my eBook or my multimedia course but it will at least give you an understanding of the basics of C. Here I begin right at the very beginning with the classic ‘Hello world' program. In order to write C code you will need a programming editor or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and a C compiler. For cross-platform development I generally use the CodeLite editor which is freely available for several operating systems: http://codelite.org/. Other good cross-platform IDEs (...)

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Learn To Program C

Special Offer!

Friday 8 November 2013

C is one of the most important of all programming languages. You can use it on Windows, OS X, Linux and most other major operating systems. It is a powerful language and good C programmers are always in demand.

The downside is that C is notoriously hard to learn. The good news is that my latest multimedia programming course should make that learning process a whole lot easier! ‘C Programming For Beginners' is an in-depth video course. It contains over 68 lectures and 7 hours of content! It takes you from the very basics of C programming right through to complex topics such as pointers, addresses, memory allocation and how to avoid common problems such as ‘buffer overruns' and ‘memory leaks'. It comes with an eBook, The Little Book Of C. And all the source code is provided read-to-run in an IDE such the free CodeLite. In fact, you can get all the tools you need to write, compile and run C programs entirely for free. If you are a novice programmer, the early lessons will (...)

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Learning Java – Three Books

Book review

Saturday 2 November 2013

Learning any new programming language can be time-consuming and confusing. On the one hand, if you are a novice programmer, you will have to learn everything from the ground up. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with one or more other languages you may be caught out by subtle differences between the language you are learning and the ones you already know.

Java can be particularly problematic for experienced programmers. If you have a background in some other language with a C-like syntax, it is tempting to assume that Java works just the way those other languages do. But you'll soon run into problems. A C programmer will have to learn Java's Object Orientation from scratch. C++ and Objective-C users will discover numerous substantial differences. And C# users will find that, in addition to syntactic differences, the Java libraries are quite unlike .NET. This month I've been looking at three books that should, in principle, help programmers get over the hurdles of learning top program in Java. Two of these books ‘The Java Tutorial' and ‘Learning Java' provide graded lessons which aim to teach you all the important features (...)

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And the MOOC shall inherit…?

Will online learning really replace the ivy-clad groves of academe?

Thursday 3 October 2013

If you have any interest in learning anything at all online, you surely can’t have failed to notice the massive increase in eLearning sites over the past couple of years. Or, as they are known (somewhat uneuphoniously) MOOCs.

The acronym MOOC stands for ‘Massive Open Online Course'. Examples of MOOCs can be found on American sites such as Coursera, edX and the newly-launched Futurelearn. These sites host multimedia courses taught by professors and graduate students from established traditional educational establishments such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard and other universities around the world. I have already signed up to a few courses myself including ‘Think Again: How to Reason and Argue' (a course on logic and arguments) from Duke University, USA, ‘Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology' (a course on dinosaurs) from the University of Alberta, Canada, and ‘Introduction to forensic science' by the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. I really never thought I'd ever get the chance to (...)

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Online Reviews - the good, the bad and the lying

Who can you trust?

Sunday 11 August 2013

Should we trust reviews online?

We may all claim to be sceptical of the honesty and impartiality of online reviews. Even so, before going to a restaurant, I must admit that I generally take a quick look at the reviews it has garnered on TripAdvisor. Before buying a book, I glance through its reviews on Amazon or Good Reads. This, in spite of the fact that there is nothing preventing authors and their friends (or enemies) from skewing reviews for or against a book. And reviewers on TripAdvisor have even praised a restaurant that doesn't exist! I was interested, then, to receive this unsolicited email this week: DO YOU NEED POSITIVE REVIEWS/RATINGS ONLINE FOR YOUR BUSINESS? We can post positive ratings/reviews on TripAdvisor, Yahoo Local, Google Places, Insider Pages, YellowPages, MerchantCircle, SuperPages, and (...)

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Programming for beginners - relational operators

Free video

Wednesday 7 August 2013

I’ve just uploaded a new video in my free series about the fundamentals of programming for beginners.

For more free courses, subscribe to the Bitwise Courses YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/BitwiseCourses And for the full range of my programming tutorials (including some special offers!) see the Bitwise Courses web site: http://www.bitwisecourses.com.

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PagePlus X7 review

Great value DTP program

Thursday 25 July 2013

PagePlus X7 £81.69 (inc VAT)
Serif
http://www.serif.com/pageplus/

You can pay big bucks for professional quality DTP applications (for example, that old favourite Quark Xpress costs £799 plus VAT). Or you could spend about £82 on PagePlus X7. Professional publishers and designers who've used Quark over the years are unlikely to ditch that software in favour of Serif's cheaper alternative. Quark, and a few other products such as Adobe's InDesign, are regarded as the industry standards. Even so, you would be wrong to think that a product that costs around one tenth the price of Quark offers a tenth the quality and capabilities. On the contrary, PagePlus is a remarkably well-featured product that will satisfy the needs of most users. For a guide to its essential features, see my review of PagePlus X6. PagePlus X7 is a remarkably powerful DTP program (...)

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Programming as literature?

(the world according to YouTube)

Tuesday 9 July 2013

When you upload videos to YouTube, you are prompted to add ’tags’ to identify its subject matter.

YouTube analyses your tags and then makes suggestions for other tags that might be appropriate. Today I uploaded a new video in my series about programming for beginners. This is what I saw in my web browser. At the top you are the tags I added. Below you can see the tags that YouTube suggests... 'Programming Language (Literary Genre)'? What the heck does that mean? Is there a literary genre of programming>? I've been trying to think which books might qualify: Tom Sharpe's 'Riotous Assembly Language' maybe? Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the C' perhaps? P G Wodehouse's 'Programming Code of The Woosters' no doubt qualifies. And as for Dan Brown's 'The Da Vinci Code' - well need I say (...)

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Programming for Beginners - Free video tutorials

Learn the basics

Tuesday 2 July 2013

If you are a novice programmer, you might be interested in the free course that I’m publishing on YouTube.

Programming For Beginners aims to explain the basics of programming - from variables and functions to data types and object orientation. This introductory video gives a bit more information.... To get the latest news on any new lessons added to this course be sure to subscribe to the Bitwise Courses YouTube channel. The latest video in this series was published earlier today. It gives a very simple overview of the ideas behind Object Orientation: For information on more in-depth courses - many of them comprising hours of video lessons, source code archives and eBooks, go to the Bitwise Courses web site. I teach courses on Ruby, C#, JavaScript, Delphi and Object Pascal. And there are more courses in the (...)

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Power DVD 13 Ultra

Multimedia playback software

Monday 1 July 2013

Power DVD 13 Ultra £79.99
http://www.cyberlink.com

Most PC users already have one or more free applications capable of playing DVDs and multimedia files. So why, you may reasonably ask, would you want to buy a commercial copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD to do exactly the same thing. The answer is that, while PowerDVD may duplicate some of the functionality of free programs such as Windows Media Player or RealPlayer, it also has a number of additional features. The Ultra version which I've been testing supports all the same technologies as a standalone Blu-Ray player (assuming you have a Blu-Ray drive and all the required hardware attached to your PC, that is!) including 7.1 audio, 3D and Ultra HD resolution (4096x2160 pixels). Lower cost versions have fewer features. The Pro (£59.99) and Essential (£34.99) editions have only 5.1 audio, (...)

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Scrivener – the word processor for writers

But can it really compete with Word?

Friday 7 June 2013

Scrivener - for Mac ($45) or Windows ($40)
Literature and Latte
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

You probably already use a word processor – Microsoft Word maybe? Or Open Office Writer? Those programs already have more features than most of us will ever use, so why would anyone want to change to some other word processing program? If you are a writer by profession, or an author by ambition, you may already have your own answer to that question. While big general-purpose word processors are packed with features, they don't always provide the ideal combination of research and organisation tools needed to plan, structure, write and revise an entire book. That is where Scrivener excels. Scrivener organises multiple documents in ‘The Binder' (at left of screen). You can create documents comprising text and graphics with split-window editing. In the pane on the right (...)

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Learn to program JavaScript

My latest course

Wednesday 29 May 2013

As you may know, I teach programming online.

A few days ago, I published a new course all about programming JavaScript. Here's a quick overview... Incidentally, if you know where to look, you can get this course at a substantial discount!

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Beginning C (5th Edition)

Book review

Friday 24 May 2013

Beginning C 5th Edition $59.99 / £35.50
by Ivor Horton
APress http://www.apress.com
ISBN-10: 1430248815
ISBN-13: 978-1430248811

Any book about programming C has a problem – namely: ‘The C Programming Language' by Kernighan and Ritchie (which I'll just call ‘K&R'). First published in 1978, K&R has undergone a number of revisions and to this day it is still widely regarded as the definitive work on C. K&R begins with then canonical ‘Hello world' program and so does ‘Beginning C'. The way in which this simple program is described in the two books gives an indication of their differing approaches. K&R describes all the features of that program – its syntax, the formatting and displaying of strings, the ‘main' function, the included library and so on – in under 3 pages. ‘Beginning C', by contrast, devotes about 10 pages to the same topic. To be (...)

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Visual Design for Adobe Flex and Flash

Amethyst 2

Tuesday 21 May 2013

My company, SapphireSteel Software, today launched a new version of Amethyst - our professional-grade IDE for Adobe Flash and Flex.

Adobe's own Flash Builder IDE for the Flex framework has actually removed its visual designer for the latest release. By contrast, we've extended the Amethyst visual designer. It can now be used to design form-like interfaces for ordinary Flash (non-Flex) applications as well as for Flex. There is a lot more than visual design in Amethyst 2, however. It also has an obfuscater, a profiler, support for games development with the Starling framework and tools to deploy mobile apps to iOS and Android. But, best of all, in my opinion, it has a great debugger that lets you step into method-calls in a series of linked bubbles. Here's a quick preview of this... More on the SapphireSteel Software web (...)

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Computer Keyboards: the old, the new and the faded

Not to mention the washable!

Thursday 25 April 2013

I’ve fimmally had emough of this danm’ keyboard! Yes, yes, I kmow – I cam’t tell ny ‘m’s fron ny ‘m’s…

So out the bloody thing goes! And in its place I have this lovely new one. And, at last, I can tell which letters are produced by which keys. The problem of letters that vanish from the keys over time is quite a common one. On my old Dell keyboard, the ‘N' and the ‘M' have long since vanished – and the ‘I', the ‘O', the ‘D' and the ‘H' are all rapidly going the same way. Search on Amazon for ‘permanent white marker' and you'll soon discover a great many people who have bought marker pens in the hope of restoring their faded keys. The Logitech K310 taking a shower I decided to take more drastic action. I bought myself a new keyboard. After some searching, the one I settled upon was the Logitech K310 – fairly cheap at under £30 (...)

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The Basics Of Cyber Warfare

Book review

Wednesday 10 April 2013

The Basics Of Cyber Warfare $29.95 / £18.99
by Steve Winterfield and Jason Andress
http://www.syngress.com
Computer Manuals
ISBN-10: 0124047378
ISBN-13: 978-0124047372

Cyber warfare may sound like rather a specialist subject. Increasingly in recent years, however, the general public has become aware of the threats posed by attacks upon computer networks, and this book aims to fill in some of the detail. ‘The Basics Of Cyber Warfare' provides a fairly simple overview of the topic. It explains the ways in which attacks and defences may be executed and it gives examples of various types of attack mounted by groups ranging from intelligence agencies to hacktivists, criminals and terrorists. It gives a very basic guide to the sorts of tools that may be used to gather information and gain access to, or compromise, supposedly secure sites. It also discusses physical attacks, for example using electromagnetic pulse weapons. While this is a slim (...)

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MotionComposer Review

Flash/HTML5 animation design software

Tuesday 9 April 2013

MotionComposer 1.6 (Mac), 1.0 (Windows) $149
Aquafadas http://www.aquafadas.com/en/motioncomposer/

Until quite recently, if you wanted to design and program cross-platform animations for display in a web browser your clear choice would be to use Adobe's Flash. With the advent of HTML5, however, you now have a choice. You can either create Flash animations programmed with ActionScript or you can render the animations with HTML5 programmed in JavaScript. Here I have created a simple animation in MotionComposer for Windows. The three ‘states' of the animation are shown in the ‘slide' at the bottom. Each state is like a keyframe on a conventional time-line based system. For many animators, the programming part is the barrier. Which explains why artists and designers have often used tools such as Adobe's Flash CSS IDE which make it possible to design user interfaces and (...)

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