RE: OT: Programming books
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Stechschulte [mailto:stech@ypisco.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 15, 2002 6:25 AM
> To: Debian Users
> Subject: Re: OT: Programming books
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 01:53:34PM +0800, Crispin Wellington wrote:
> > If your project is 2D and you want to develop it rapidly
> and robustly,
> > and want it to run on all sorts of machines (not just linux) then I
> > recommend using Python with the pygame library (bindings to the SDL
> > libraries). Python has extremely string OO including multiple
> > inheritance. Pygame is a high powered and cross platform
> game dev API.
[...]
> This sounds interesting but I was really hoping to use C or
> C++ since I
> really want to learn more with those languages. I'll have to think
> about this a while. I've mostly overlooked Python as a programming
> language simply because it enforces programming style. Kind
> of weak of
> me I know, especially since that is basically the style I use anyway;
> however, I just don't think it is a languages place to enforce style.
If you're making the game as a learning exercise to learn more about C/C++, then do it with those languages. Python is very high level. This means that you can get a ton more work done (I bet you could write the game in less than half the time if you used Python) for the time you spend on it. Conversely, you won't learn the things it sounds like you want to learn. So if you want to do it in C/C++, use that, since it'll exercise your brain more. (That said, I must reiterate that Python is a brilliant language and you should definitely check it out when you have a chance -- and it does not enforce programming style, it merely uses whitespace instead of braces to delimit code blocks. In other words, it eliminates the need for "curly styles" altogether. You can use OO, procedural, functional (somewhat) styles... whatever you want.)
To address your original question about programming books, I'm certain that you will get a lot of responses pointing to a book called "Code Complete". I forget the author. Nor have I yet had time to read the book myself. But it seems to be the one book that everyone points to when someone asks for a good book on software engineering in general (as opposed to simply learning a language). Ignore the fact that it's published by Microsoft Press.
Erik
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