My Reviews, CPU's and Books

Well folks you'll have no-doubt noticed I'm getting a fair few reviews out there, mainly through my YouTube channel, but also via Amazon where you'll find me fiddling and filming many items.

However, I wanted to just take a moment, to say; even though I get these items, if they are rubbish, I'll tell you.  I reserve all my own editorial rights, and though you can see something as cheap or free as a viable worthy thing, I'm still going to tell you if they fail miserable; simply because that's what people need to know.

You need to know if the items you're getting are utterly rubbish or not, whether it's worth spending money on, or even if it's cheap and decent, or just "good enough"; you know as a stop gap measure.

So expect many more things to float this way soon... I have an Android Tablet to review, a pretty nice looking Carry-All for gaming/software purposes; as someone on the move with many software facets, it'll be nice to have a bag with actual pockets for CD's or DVDs... and yes, I still use optical media!

I am also looking at filming a new-updated series about writing your own CPU, my previous posts here about it are perhaps my most viewed pieces, and the YouTube videos about them (which are silent) are pretty popular too.... But they're not perfect, they are as I say, Silent, they are perhaps incomplete, and to be honest they need updating to C++14.

There is also another reason for me to push out a new software series anyway, and that is that I'm constructing a book, yes me... An author!... I've been toying and trialling different styles for a technical book for sometime, a book for office use, to teach others to think and code as I do.

The reason being, we're hiring graduates, and they don't have the experience firstly, but now they're all very much younger than myself, and they don't have the grounding in computing.  When they're sat in front of an eight core, 3Ghz PC with 16GB of RAM, and they describe it as "slow", I just want to slap them around the back of the head with a rolled up news paper.

So, I started a document about how they should perhaps approach programming, gave some algorithms as to how they can see how something can be slow, but actually their machines are quite fast!... This was a success, and at least two of the people hired around me have stuck around, despite being very young graduates with very narrow fields of experience, they've become pretty good jobbing programmers.

I feel therefore I might make a more experience orientated programming book, many of them out there are tutorials, or "beginners", or even expert friendly, and many of them impart good knowledge, but I don't believe many expand or impart skills to the reader, and it's that skills bit which is difficult.

Difficult because in text, you're reduced to being very verbose, a picture speaks a thousand words, but a picture is not going to explain how to code all the time, so I'm struggling with word count and audience attention span at the moment, at least with my initial drafts.

Drafts?... Multiple?... Yes, because, like with my blog posts, I'm breaking this whole thing down in to different texts, a basic, a couple of middling and one expert tome, it what I'm aiming for at the moment.  Backed up with an initial FREE! Introduction set.  I also plan to perhaps have a free book about cross-platform work too, or the cross-platform development environment, and then a paid for book about actually doing cross-platform work.

The idea being, the reader can boot-strap into my text for free, then cherry pick what sections they may want.

I'd not want the whole series to cost more than a few pounds, we're not even talking tens of pounds, literally the whole lot for less then £9.99.  But each individual part I do want to charge for, a few pounds at a time, so to speak.

And why read my stuff?.. Well, if not to get a job with me, to at least feel more than just a programming, to take that step towards being a developer, to being better, and thinking better of the work you do.

Also to let me feel a little self-important... Right?... that's the best bit!... Be Xel trained today!

My Silent & Popular Videos

Some of you may have noticed that over the years I've created some example videos, however, most of them before 2015 are silent, there's a very good reason for this, many of them were created on a system which had no sound input, or were recorded in places where I could not perform to the camera or microphone.

However, recently I've started to perform for you all, and you can hear my droning monotonous bullshit spouting off gob on most all the videos.

Unfortunately, this leaves me in a difficult position, because I have multiple uploads getting many views (multiple thousands on some), but they're silent and get commented as such.  People apparently need me to explain some of these items.

So, my new focus through June for technology is two pronged, the first is to remake those original videos which are silent, specifically the Boost Libraries on Windows stuff, that is all very popular, it is still accurate, but we're currently on boost v1.61.0, and it would be advantageous to remake those videos.

The second prong is an effort to start explaining some more programming topics, the first of which is linking to MySQL from source, another is building the GCC toolset from source, and finally there's going to be a series on programming C++.

This last item however, is going to be related to a book I'm putting together, to self-publish on Amazon's platform.  Which is going to be my own personal, probably quite antique feeling "Introduction to Programming with C++".

This is perhaps one of the hardest topics for a programmer to write upon properly, because you have to constantly stop yourself running a head, or assuming anything about your audience.  Many other books on the programming topic tend, in my experience, to leap a head assuming that the reader knows more than they might.  Or that they understand some technology or phrase being used.

I'm hoping to break that down, and get over the hurdle of introducing the topic by giving away the first part of the book for free, here on this blog perhaps, and that first part is really going to be a guide on how to use the rest of the book, it'll contain details of whom might benefit from the content, and it'll also help an absolute beginner understand what programming is, and how to start to think, before trying and perhaps getting frustrated by the actual tutorial segments of the tome.

Expect all this, through June & July!

And of course, keep tabs on my YouTube channel, which I am posting to very regularly now...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT8m3rFQoGJ_nEs22m3xoPw