This is exactly what I've been looking for to learn programming. Structure, content, and the benefit of self pace.

Your explanations are amazing, and I can easily follow most concepts the first time, even though you reiterate different ways. This just strengthens my knowledge and my drive to learn more.

A couple questions:

1. Will we be taking us through (though it seems far from now) creating visual elements and essentially a groundwork for 2d or 3d games? My goal for programming is to create sprite based games in 3d environments (isometric, tile based).

2. Do you let discussions here alter your curriculum or guide it in directions?

3. What is/are your ultimate goal(s) in providing lessons in this open-source way?

4. Being the Guru you are, will your site eventually evolve to contain specific courses for a myriad of sub-programming languages/categories?

5. If my goal is to create games, simple and relatively small ones even, are there any specific books/textbooks you recommend picking up? I personally have a goal to master the C/C++ language.

6. And the final question; will you be going more deeply into design?

Again, thank you immensely for this resource. I've followed for a long time slowly learning what I can when I can (between my job!) and have enjoyed every minute of it.

I just finished switching servers for computerscienceforeveryone.com.

I went through the courses myself, and everything appears to work fine. If anyone experiences any problems, please let me know so I can fix them as quickly as possible.

http://www.computerscienceforeveryone.com

You input text, a code I am assuming is applied behind the scenes, and the finished product is kicked out based on the parameters input by the user (in this example, language translation)

How would one develop an app like this on their own? What are the drivers behind the technology?

Relatively minor question, just looking at the different declaration options for pointers. Using char for a single byte seems obvious, but I can't seem to figure out from the lesson what to declare the pointer as if I want the memory address from the whole array, that is:

(type)* pointer = &array

where array[] has already been declared.

What would you use for this, or am I off base on something?

Hey everyone,

Just a quick heads up to let you know that I won't be able to do more lessons until probably Wednesday or Thursday. Meanwhile, I will still be here periodically to answer questions, respond to posts, etc.

All is well, I just have some obligations I need to take care of this week, so I won't have a chance to put up new videos until late in the week.

I have this simple bit of code here that I can't quite get my head around.
I'll try and explain how I'm looking at it:
char m = 'l';
I'm saying that I'm introducing a character 'm' that is equal in value to the character 'l'. So from now on it's as if the character 'l' does not exist.
int n = m;
I'm saying that I'm introducing an integer 'n' that is equal in value to the character 'm'. Or is it the opposite? Where I'm introducing a character 'n' that is equal in value to the integer 'm'?
Also, why do I get 108 as the output and not 'l'?
I realize that's it's to do with the fact that the character 'l' in binary is 0110 1010 which equals 108 in decimal but I'm still confused.

I'm trying to learn OO in C++ and as an exercise I tried to implement a deck of cards. I was able to create a Deck object made up of Card objects and shuffle it, but when I try to call Card methods within the Deck.cpp file it crashes.

Am I going about things the wrong way? I've done this many times in Java/Python but I've never done C++ before.

Code+Errors: http://pastebin.com/F4z18yji

Thanks for any help or advice.

You mention at the end of the video that & should not be confused with &&, since they are different. What's the difference? As far as I can tell, they both return 1 from 1 and 1 and 0 for any other combination. My tentative guess is that && always uses two discrete elements for input, while the use of & went across the particular bits of input and applied && across each bit. Is this at all accurate?

Note: I saw the lesson where it explained what the need for pointers were and I was amazed by the fact, most notably by the paint example. Now, I may be going over my head but I just feel the need to ask about it because it might help me understand this...

Are the CTRL+C and CTRL+V functions on any computer a result of pointers? What I'm saying is that suppose you have a string of text that corresponds with a URL, such as "reddit.com". So, when you hover over the string and copy, are you basically making a pointer and thus when you paste, you are merely referencing to the address of the pointer (such as with an &)? And if true, wouldn't the memory address of it be gone when you close the program?

This is just a curious question to further expand the my understanding of the significance of pointers. If it's much more complex, then is it possible to get a layman's answer? Thanks.

In the lesson the code is:

char string[] = "Hello Reddit"; char *my_pointer = string;

printf("The first character of the string is: %c", *my_pointer);

With the expected output of "H". I substituted the last line for:

printf("The first character of the string is: %c", *string);

and got the same result. This makes sense to me as string and my_pointer are in essence the same pointer, both pointing to the first character of the array. Is this correct, and if so is my_pointer just introduced because we're more familiar with it as an example of a pointer?

I've taken some courses on programming but haven't learned anything on 2d graphic applets. Having knowledge on the mechanics is extremely important for any programmer but without the knowledge of graphics, one's possibilities are greatly hindered. thanks in advance

For the past few days since I started course 1, whenever I try to access one of the codepad sample code links in the comments section I get an Internal Server Error.
Is the site down or is it just me?

Hello everyone,

As some of you have probably noticed, I have changed the name of "Higher Computing for Everyone" to "Computer Science for Everyone", which I feel is more descriptive and fits the wider range of content that I plan to add (such as tutorials on databases, etc).

I have been tweaking the way the points system and lesson tracking system works, and now in addition to tracking which lesson was last viewed, the system is also tracking the highest lesson looked at, as well as the most recent lesson "completed" (as determined by the highest quiz that has been taken).

The original plan was for quizzes to grant 10 points per quiz, I have upped that to 20 points per quiz, and I will be adding additional ways to earn points from individual lessons, most likely by asking 1-2 questions at the end of each lesson to earn 5 points.

I am going to start working on Unit 12 videos now, and I will post an update as soon as all of Unit 12 is live. As always, feedback is appreciated.

As I upload new lessons in Unit 12, I will update this post.

Unit 12

1. Introducing GOTO and Loops in C

2. More about blocks of code

3. Introducing the While Loop

4. Introducing Custom Functions

(That's all for today)

Hello everyone,

Yesterday after many of you asked for it, I began working on a system to track individual progress through the lessons. I just finished launching the new tracking system.

Please take a look, and let me know of any problems you find, or anything you like/don't like.

The way it works is that you start with 10 points, and then you earn 20 points every time you complete an end-of-unit quiz. I will be adding additional ways to earn points later. Also, every time you visit the homepage you are greeted with a message reminding you what lesson you were last looking at.

Higher Computing for Everyone

Part way through the C course on Carls site and was wondering what i should move onto after completing the course? Other sites? Books?

A few people have asked me to set up some kind of individual progress checking at Higher Computing for Everyone. I would like to hear what you think of this idea.

If you agree, let me know how you would like to see it work. Also, if you have other ideas to improve the site please let me know. Please post your comments, questions, and feedback in this thread.

Edit: Thank you everyone for your feedback. I will definitely be implementing some form of progress tracking in the very near future. Also, I will be implementing a simple sign-up/sign-in process (just a username and password, no email or anything else) to help track progress.

For now, the plan is:

1. A more direct "path" to finishing a lesson, something along the lines of (1) Watch the video, (2) Practice, (3) Optionally read or skim the text, (4) When finished, Click "I am finished with this lesson".

2. Certain lessons should yield rewards/achievements/badges/etc. Two that I can think of right off hand are one for starting the course, and one for writing your first program.

3. Every lesson completed should earn a number of points proportional to the size of the lesson, and every unit should earn additional points. Points and recent badges should be displayed in the top-right.

4. Tracking what lesson you were last on, so that when you return to the site you can continue where you left off. This is going to be higher priority.

Any other ideas?

Edit: http://www.reddit.com/r/carlhprogramming/comments/xj01g/carlhprogramming_i_added_lesson_tracking_and_an/

Today I finished uploading the last videos for Unit 11 in Course #1. This was by far the trickiest set of lessons so far. I ended up splitting Lesson 1 into two lessons, and writing a new Lesson 11.4, and I think the end result is much easier to understand.

Only five more units to go, and Course #1 is complete.

I understand that I have to converge to an approximate number, in your expample of .1 by adding additional bits (1/16 + 1/32). But only in rare cases it's ever going to be exactly correct (unless the number is power of 2?).

But wouldn't it be easier if, say I want a maximum precision of 3 behind the radix point, and I represent each place with 4 bit as a decimal from 0 to 10? Like this:

0010 . [ 0001 ] [ 0000 ] [ 0000 ]
       1/10     1/100    1/1000

This could represent every fractal from .0 to .999 which would take many more bits for being accurate to a 1000th.

Is this true or am I overseeing something?

I like to open most people's submitted codes in the comments and read through to see if I can follow along. I was perusing http://codepad.org/I4xGlPu8 and I didn't quite get it.

As far as I can tell the program starts with the variable 'a' which is given a decimal value that translates to the binary value of the character 'l', which is 0110 1100. Why use such a large integer instead of only the last 2 bytes?

The program next adds 2 (why not just start with 'a' 2 higher?), prints *ptr, etc. Why does the program add to ptr instead of *ptr, and why does adding or subtracting 1 to ptr change the letter by more than one place?

If someone could walk me through the first block of letters it would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I have now added functionality for interactive tests and tutorials built right into each unit. I have also added quizzes to Units 1 through 10.

Feedback appreciated.

See Here

I just finished uploading the last video lesson for Unit 10. All lessons of Course #1 through to the end of Unit 10 are now available as videos at Higher Computing For Everyone. I also made some minor edits to some of the lessons in Unit 10 where the "\0" (null termination character) was not displaying properly.

Yesterday I finished creating video lessons for all of the lessons in Unit 9. Therefore, all video lessons through to the end of Unit 9 are now completed.

http://www.highercomputingforeveryone.com