Take Up Code

The preprocessor is old, primitive, and strong. But you need to understand its strengths to use it effectively. It adds capabilities that the C++ compiler cannot come close to duplicating on its own.

Chaining is a common term that has several different meanings. This episode explains how you can use chaining in your programs and how it works.

Programming languages have a lot of operators. More than most calculators anyway. Do you know what they are? Did you know there is an order to them? This episode explains precedence, associativity, and evaluation order.

What types of programmers are there?

Iterators give you the ability to navigate from one item to another in a collection and track a specific position within a collection. This episode is part two and continues describing even more advanced iterator topics.

Iterators give you the ability to navigate from one item to another in a collection. Why is this so special? Now that you know how to work with various collections, you know that they are structured very differently. An array just needs to move a pointer to the next item. A list needs to follow wherever the next pointer leads. A binary tree needs to go up and down the tree. Iterators give you a common way to navigate no matter what kind of collection you are using.

You will need to be able to work with groups or collections of items. You have choices and this episode continues more than a week long exploration of collection types available. Up today is the dictionary. I will explain what dictionaries are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

You will need to be able to work with groups or collections of items. You have choices and this episode continues more than a week long exploration of collection types available. Up today is the hash table. I will explain what hash tables are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

What can you expect your job to be like as a new programmer?

A game that only has one character with one quest and with one shop that sells one item is not going to be very fun. That is why you need to be able to work with collections of items. You have choices and this episode continues more than a week long exploration of collection types available. Up today is the left-child right-sibling tree. I will explain what these trees are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

A game that only has one character with one quest and with one shop that sells one item is not going to be very fun. You have choices for storing collections of items and this episode continues more than a week long exploration of collection types available. Up today is the binary tree. I will explain what binary trees are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

You will need to be able to work with groups or collections of items. A game that only has one character with one action and with one opponent is not going to be very fun. Up today is the list. I will explain what lists are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

You will need to be able to work with groups or collections of items. A game that only has one character with one action and with one opponent is not going to win any awards. First up today is the array. I will explain what arrays are and then give you some guidance on when to use them.

How can you prevent denial of service attacks? Most of the techniques you will use to prevent a DOS attack are network related. This podcast is about programming so I will explain some things you can do that will make your software more resistant to attack.

There are some common Big-O notations that you should become familiar with as well as what kind of code leads to them. This episode continues the discussion of Big-O notation so make sure to listen to episode 37 first. Knowing the signs of these will help you write more efficient code and for some of them could actually mean the difference between your program working vs. never completing at all.

Big-O notation gives you the ability to describe how fast your code will run if given a large problem. It does not base anything on how fast or slow your computer actually is. It just looks at the steps needed to solve the problem and how they scale as the problem gets bigger.

Have you ever thought about why you cannot see stars during the day? How about why car headlights are so much brighter at night? Or why you can only hear a pin drop in a silent room? All of our body senses are like this. Our body is logarithmic.

Programming involves giving specific instructions but sometimes you want the ability to introduce random behavior. Maybe you want to simulate how a human character sometimes does things in a different order or takes a different path. Or maybe you want the computer to select various items from a collection. Or maybe you want to simulate the randomness of rolling dice. This episode explains how to do this.

What are denial of service attacks? The datacenter that hosts the Take Up Code podcast was put under so much stress due to a coordinated attack that the the entire datacenter had to be taken offline for several days while measures were taken to combat the attack. What happened? And what was done to make it better? That is what I am going to begin explaining today.

C# also supports both implicit and explicit casts and gives you some different choices when you need to switch types. Plus you have a runtime that is ready to throw an InvalidCastException. But even if you do not hit an exception, there are some things you should be aware of. This is still casting.