Category «Programming»

Building my kite lights

I’ve built some lights to go on my kites and they have all kinds of patterns and colors. I was asked about how they were made, and several people asked if they could buy some. I’m going with the easier route of describing how I made them. Maybe someday I’ll sell completed sets. This is …

Design Patterns in Games

There have been several questions about design patterns over on gamedev.net recently. It must be that time of the school year again. I’ve seen some comments on the topic of design patterns and I’ve got some thoughts and notes that may be valuable in those cases. (If I’ve directed you here from the forum, it’s …

Programming for Performance

Working with games means programming, but it is also a special kind of programming.  When working on a game you know will be used for competitive play in some ways is like the Formula One race cars; everything you do needs to consider performance. When working on a game you may know that the game is going …

RAII is also about destruction

In my last article I wrote a little about the initialization side of RAII, Resource Acquisition Is Initialization, in this one I will talk about the flip side, RAII is also about destruction and cleanup.

Annotations, Attributes, and Other Hidden Dependencies.

Today at work we had a big discussion about annotations in some Java code.  These wonderful little inventions save a time and make life much easier for programmers, but they are also the source of terrible nightmares.  To get into the subject, I’ll need to explain a few things for the audience. 

C++ Book List

C++ Books

Last update 10 Nov 2017. There are an ENORMOUS number of C++ books.  Many of them (sadly) have major errors, describing a language that is similar to, but fundamentally different from, the actual C++ language.  There are many lists like Stack Overflow’s book guides, both for books to read and books to avoid. There have been several …