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Closed 10 years ago.
what is a good book to learn fractal programming? I am a programmer, I am looking at a book that will be more algorithmic than mathematical (at least not in the beginning chapters). Should teach me the basics of fractals and different ways to generate them.
You might find the electric sheep project interesting.
It's an open source, distributed programming project that generates fractal animations.
Scott Drave's original paper on the electric sheep algorithm is a nice introduction to the algorithm used, and it concentrates mostly on the algorithmic aspect of creating the fractal image:
http://flam3.com/flame.pdf
When trying to learn the Mandelbrot set, I found this link useful.
http://warp.povusers.org/Mandelbrot/
For more than just Mandlebrot stuff if you can get ahold of "The Science of Fractal Images". It's an old book now (I read it when it was first published in 1988) but it's full of bits and pieces to try out.
A "golden oldie" site is Fractint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractint. Fractint is 20 years old and pioneered some of the ethos in collaborative computing. Some of the algorithms needed to increase precision are not trivial and this group developed integer arithmetic to support fractals.
Worth visiting to get the feel if nothing else.
But also visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal-generating_software. There's a huge variety.
Note that some fractals such as the Mandelbrot set are "pixel-based" while others such as the "Snowflake curve" can use vector graphics. You'll need both approaches.
Some links
Fractal Programming
Fractal Geometry
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm starting to use the NLTK library, and I want to check whether a sentence in English is correct or not.
Example:
"He see Bob" - not correct
"He sees Bob" - correct
I read this, but it's quite hard for me.
I need an easier example.
Grammar checking is an active area of NLP research, so there isn't a 100% answer (maybe not even an 80% answer) at this time. The simplest approach (or at least a reasonable baseline) would be an n-gram language model (normalizing LM probabilities for utterance length and setting a heuristic threshold for 'grammatical' or 'ungrammatical'.
You could use Google's n-gram corpus, or train your own on in-domain data. You might be able to do that with NLTK; you definitely could with LingPipe, the SRI Language Modeling Toolkit, or OpenGRM.
That said, an n-gram model won't perform all that well. If it meets your needs, great, but if you want to do better, you'll have to train a machine-learning classifier. A grammaticality classifier would generally use features from syntactic and/or semantic processing (e.g. POS-tags, dependency and constituency parses, etc.) You might look at some of the work from Joel Tetrault and the team he worked with at ETS, or Jennifer Foster and her team at Dublin.
Sorry there isn't an easy and straightforward answer...
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have been trying my hand at php for quite some time but dont think i have reached the level of expertise i desired.I started reading an ebook and writing down all the code examples present there on my own,which i think is inefficient.
My question is addressed to anyone who's an expert in any programming language.I just wanna know how do you guys do what you do so well,and as i mentioned in the title,what is the most efficient way to approach a new programming language so as to gain maximum from it making it an enriching experience.I love coding,have studied quite a few languages but left them all at intermediate levels after learning the basics and some advanced portions.
Wanna excel at php,so any tips would be really helpful from any of you highly skilled programmers on the website.
Thanks!
I find that the most useful thing to do when trying to learn in programming is just to work at it. Just looking and copying someone elses code isn't going to get you very far, you'll learn faster by trying to attempt something, and you're probably not going to succeed for a while, but keep working at it, fixing bugs as you go, and it'll just start to stick.
Also the php.net documentation is pretty fantastic, so just keep that open as you go.
In php, try to make a basic dynamic site, then work your way up.
The thing that takes you from intermediate to expert is a combination of: practice, reading other people's code, and understanding the language specification and libraries.
Once you are at intermediate level, your primary reference should be the language definition and library documentation, and for third party libraries, their documentation, and their code, as necessary.
You can also consult advance-level third party materials, and try to implement relatively advanced or fundamental programming concepts (e.g. continuations) in the language, to push your understanding.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Does anyone have a standard project that they use when learning a new language. Kinda like a specification document of a project that includes all aspects of programming. Does anyone use some sort of beginning type project when learning a new language? I guess it also depends on the type of language and what's it's capable of.
Contributing something to an open source project seems to work for me. In addition to getting exposed to some coding habits in the language , you get to work on something useful.
Going through the first few problems of Project Euler is a very good way to get a handle on topics like I/O, recursion, iteration, and basic data structures. I'd highly recommend it.
A friend of mine had a coworker who coded a minesweeper every time when he wanted to learn a new language with GUI.
I like making simple websites for learning.
Pro: you can put it online and show it to people.
Con: the language has to be suitable for web development.
Writing a simple ray tracer:
math functions (pow, sqrt, your own intersection routines)
recursion (because it is a whitted style recursive one)
iteration (for all pixels)
how to write custom types (rays, possibly vectors)
pixel wise graphics
have something to play with compiler's (optimization-) flags
optional:
simple GUI
file reading writing
I've also done so with metatrace.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm trying to find a good, simple introduction to domain driven design, but that is proving to be difficult.
The books I have looked at all share the same problems.
They are massive 300+ pages. I really wish this practice would change with computer books.
They shine in chapter 1, explaining the introductory and basic concepts. Then when it comes down to getting into the material they blaze through the advanced concepts with poor examples and little explanation, then jump to the next concept.
Am I asking too much when I ask is there a book for domain driven design under 300 pages that progresses at a constant pace?
I hate it when books spend so much time on the introductory concepts, yet don't bother explaining the more advanced stuff.
Update
The reason I want a sub 300 page book is because those 500+ page monsters have a lot of fluff in them and can't seem to get to the point (or skip it altogether).
Try this one - available online at InfoQ. On the plus side, it's free. On the downside, it might be too basic for you. If you want an introduction though, surely it's the basic concepts that you want to get to grips with first before delving into the advanced topics?
Domain Driven Design Quickly - 104 pages.
There's also another free download, DDD Step by Step - a really short introduction to DDD, only 34 pages.
(and the corresponding webpage Think DDD)
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Closed 10 years ago.
My company needs 3D visualization for our commercial applications (CAD, mesh manipulation, computational geometry). We are tired of true vision 3D (tv3d), which we've been using for years (poor support, compatibility problems).
Our manager wants to use hoops 3d from tech soft 3D for software development. While I have no experience of it, my prejudices are:
Overpriced
Relatively few users - poor support
Old and outdated
Am I wrong about Hoops 3d?
What is your experience? Is Hoops useful?
Advantages?
Disadvantages?
Several years ago I was involved in a project that used HOOPs. The company didn't want to pay royalties any more and wasn't very convinced that HOOPs was the right product for them so I ported all the HOOPs functionality they used over to OpenGL. I have summarised my experience of this below but you will have to determine what is relevant for your projects.
Disadvantages/costs for that project:
Needed to write object picking (HOOPs supplied that)
Needed to write virtual trackball (HOOPs supplied that) [although sample code to do this is freely available]
Had to move some data storage from HOOPs over to our own data structures
Advantages for that project:
Able to use features of OpenGL such as transparency (although surely HOOPs has that by now?)
Lots of resources to find help with OpenGL
Better performance (for our case - I don't know if this is still true as it seems HOOPs uses OpenGL/DirectX underneath now)
Better support for consumer-priced graphics cards & laptops
More flexibility to go beyond what HOOPs thinks you should need to do
The big wins were the resources to find help and greater flexibility.