Recent content by BillLeeLee

I agree with you. If he wants his nephews/nieces to do something, find something they have a natural affinity for. This could be programming, it could be anything. Hell, I picked up baking since it was like science and algorithms.

Well if you give him two months, that should be more than enough time to get reasonably familiar with -something- and be able to produce some results. Let's take Python First you can start with the Python tutorial as ambientZ said. You can extend that with Google's Code University for Python...

You do need some sort of metric to define this progress. Are you a programmer yourself? Do you know any languages? If you're not and you don't, then you might be surprised if he only produced a console program while you expected some type of graphical showcase. If you got him a book for, say, C...

I use both Python 2.6 and Python 2.7 at work. Python 2.7 is compatible with anything that is 2.6 compatible. Some stuff has been backported into 2.7 from 3.x, but core stuff will behave as you expect it would in 2.6. Python 3 is vastly different from Python 2.x - print is now a real function...

I thought I had reviewed Linode before, but a search in this thread doesn't yield any results. I've been with linode.com for nearly 2 years, and was with Slicehost before that for about a year. Linode has been fantastic for me - they're not rock-bottom price like some VPS hosts who charge...

Not a bad lens, at the 18 mm end there's vignetting, but overall it's a pretty decent lens. I like the 18-200 VRII as well ($650-750), but the problem of late is that Nikon (and probably Canon) glass just costs more, perhaps due to the weak USD and import prices/strong yen/whatever. Or at...

The big question to ask yourself is if you will be willing to drop big money on good glass? The 18-55 that camera comes with is very basic, okay-ish image quality. But you will feel wanting for either a better wide angle or a lens capable of better distance zooming, and those can get pricey...

Looks to be either standalone Aptana or Eclipse with Aptana plugin. This image is of standalone Aptana:

It's A language, but what are you learning it for? Many languages exist because they have different strengths. C++ is general purpose, multi-paradigm, and while it's one of my languages of choice, it's not the language I use for everything (it has to compete with Python, Java, Scala, and even...

That book follows a very different teaching style from Accelerated C++. In C++, the age of the book is certainly not correlated with its 'good-ness' and usefulness, unlike books for languages like Java or Python which go through major language changes more frequently. The last ratified C++...

HTML is not programming. Visual C++ Express is a good, free compiler. As for learning C++, I have never found any online tutorials to be particularly good. You should really get a book like Accelerated C++.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58354/algorithm-data-structure-design-interview-questions has some general stuff. Use the resources/puzzles out there to refresh your memory (or just learn new information) about algorithms and data structures. I never know what to expect when I get to the...

The questions are typically more of "Here's a function we want you to write", and my interviewers have been generous with the fact that syntax or function arguments might be off. They wanted to see that I could actually write code and solve a problem with it, even if I missed a ';' or something...

Bug in Java Auto-Update, you'll have to resort to a registry hack, or could do a more proper method. Some fixes are detailed here: http://serverfault.com/questions/14303/cant-seem-to-disable-java-automatic-update

I've been asked to code during phone interviews, and then in person, but have never been asked to provide samples up front. mikeblas makes a good point that doing that is not really a good indicator of one's ability to write and design code. However, on phone interviews, it's always nerve...