Category: General Programming

Hey ,

my blog may contain lot of errors , i do not think many people ready my blog . I am therefore posting these as notes to myself , but  if someone did bump into my blog , I still hope that they find this garbage useful !. Please understand that none of it is authoritative

Fltk stands for FAST and Light Toolkit , it as an easy to use UI framework in C++ with a very short learning curve also you should be able to desgin by drag n drop using FLUID . I discovered this rather late !

Here are a set of online tutorials that helped me learn about Windows Programming , This is a short post – hoping that someone who happen to bump on to my blog finds it useful

(a) Forgers Win32 API programming tutorial  :  http://winprog.org/tutorial/

(b) Iczelion Win32 programming tutorials :- In assembly but the concepts remain the same.

http://win32assembly.programminghorizon.com/tutorials.html

http://www.woodmann.com/RCE-CD-SITES/Iczelion/

 

The best book on Windows Programming is by Charles Petzold , search on amazon.

 

 

 

I know no one really reads my blog , so here is again another note to myself on commonly used  linux commands for the heck of it ! . Hopefully someones finds it useful . Hoping that writing this down refreshes my frail memory

Getting help

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$ # try –help with the command
$ man <command name>
$ info <command name>
$ apropos <command name>
[/sourcecode]

Listing Directories

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$ls -a #lists all files
$ls -l #long listing
$ls -t # time
$ls -s # size
$ls -r # reverse
$ ls -ar # combination
[/sourcecode]

Changing Directories

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$pwd # returns the current directory
$cd <dirname> # change directory to the given directory
[/sourcecode]

Copying files

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$cp
$cp -r #recursive copy
$cp -i #interactive
[/sourcecode]

Creating/Removing directories

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$mkdir #Creates
$rmdir #Removes
[/sourcecode]

Displaying file contents

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$cat <file1> <file2> <file3>
$more <file1> <file2> <file3>
$less <file1> <file2> <file3> # you do more with less !
$head -n <file> # top n lines of the file
$tail -n <file> #bottom n lines of the file
[/sourcecode]

Pattern matching with grep

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$grep <pattern> <files>
$grep -i <pattern> <files> #case insensitive

[/sourcecode]

Sorting

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$sort <filename>
$sort -r <filename> #sort in reverse
[/sourcecode]

Sed

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$# See : http://www.regular-expressions.info/ , sed can be used to parsing text and performing various transformations
$sed ‘s/<pattern>/<pattern to replace> <filename>
$#man sed
[/sourcecode]

Symbolic Links

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$ln -s <filename> <link name> #soft link , omit -s for hard links
[/sourcecode]

Changing Permissions

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$chmod <permissions> <files> # permissions – a,b,c = r*4+w*2+x

[/sourcecode]

Switch Users

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$su (switch user)

[/sourcecode]

Tee send output to 2 devices

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$tee [a] file

[/sourcecode]

Fill standard output with same thing

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$yes <string> | <command>

[/sourcecode]

Useful process control commands

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$jobs
$fg
$bg
$kill <pid>
$ps

[/sourcecode]

Environment Variables

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$export varname = value

[/sourcecode]

Shortcuts with alias

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$alias ls=’ls la’

[/sourcecode]

which is the executable

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$which commandname

[/sourcecode]

Disk utilities

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$du # disk usage
$df # disk free

[/sourcecode]

Compression utilities

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$gzip / gunzip
$tar
$bunzip2
$lzma / unlzma

[/sourcecode]

Checking integrity

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$md5sum

[/sourcecode]

File Comparison

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$diff

[/sourcecode]

Location of files

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$find <path> -name <name>
$locate <filename>

[/sourcecode]

Downloading websites offline

[sourcecode language=”bash”]
$wget
[/sourcecode]

I have worked with few UI libraries during my college days (late night hackwork !). Although It has months since i really coded something in C/C++ . Here is my opinion on most of the UI frameworks ( choices available    ) .

(a) Win32 API , GDI (user32.dll)
This was the most difficult to work with initially . I initially found it more difficult to work with than X , with strange typedef’s and cumbersome hungarian Notation etc . But once you get the hang of it , its quite easy . But getting the hang of it may take some time . You may look at Charles Petzold programming Windows for more information.(Works only on Windows AFAIK , or may be Wine and ReactOS )

(b) MFC
MFC is quite friendly . You can make ui’s pretty quickly and easily . But if you follow one of those ”
teach yourself MFC in xx days ” , you might get stuck at some point of time . You should start from the ground up without using the wizards provided and then later switch to wizards after you get more advanced . It also provides many features (Document View Architecture , to name a few ) and most developers usually do not properly utilize them  . Works only on Windows AKIK , or may be Wine and ReactOS )

(c)GTK
The Gimp”s toolkit . It was initially made for the development of the GNU Image manipulation program or the GIMP . Its very easy to write ui’s in GIMP and now you have glade available . The gimp website provides sufficent documentation and its pretty cool ! . The downside of gtk is that , its strong only in *nix platforms . The ui elements may look a touch different depending upon the platform .

(d)FOX
Its yet another cool framework which i have worked with. Its pretty impressive , ui elements look the same in all platforms . But the downside of fox is that it has a slightly steeper learning curve compared to Gtk , and it somewhat mimics MFC in its API .

(e)QT
QT is the best i guess in terms of quality and portability , but qt has a confusing license . Other than that its awesome .It competes with MFC in ease of use and beats it completely in portability   . It boasts of a signal — connect sort of thing , but there is nothing novel in it .

(f)svgalib
its pretty good as well . its easy to use , but need root privilleges ,its quite buggy as well

(g)Allegro
Easy to use multiplatform gaming framework

(h)SDL- Simple DirectMedia Layer
Same as Allegro

(i)Xlib
Honestly its initially easier to learn Xlib , than Win32 API . But it only provides barebones functionality . There is an autoritative X book by main authours themselfves. I havent coded in Xlib for the past 3 years , so forgot most of it . Also if you have experience programming Windows , programming X should not be too difficult .

There are others as well , but I will stop for the time being …….