Hi all!
About three weeks ago, a friend IMed me the trailer for Handmade Hero. About a week later, we started watching the series together using a site that allowed us to watch in sync. We've finished the 'Intro to C' videos and the next video to watch is Day 2's Q&A. It helps to have a partner on this trip, someone who you can bounce ideas off of and with whom you can talk about the video.
I wanted to say - thank you so much for this. I've been very interested in this sort of thing for a long time. I already do a lot of programming in Perl and other languages, but have shied away from C and C++ for a long time, and this series has already helped me with the 'Intro to C' mini-series, kickstarting my path to learning C and C++.
But more than that... I feel this series is something that is sorely needed in general. Understanding what's truly going on under the hood is something that not many people know about nowadays - including me. I think this series is really going to help cultivate (and, I'm sure, already is cultivating) a new wave of programmers who can do so much more than today's programmers can, simply because they know what's going on. We're not going to try to catch up; we're just going to take things at our own pace.
One thing I found interesting was that Casey found it astounding how, during one Q&A session that I've watched, there were 700 live watchers of the stream. I can tell you exactly why that was the case - it was because of that superb trailer. I keep watching it, and every time I feel like I need to cry. That was perfectly done, and captured the essence of the project very effectively and succinctly.
I use Cygwin on my computer, and decided to set up my dev environment such that I could use VS2008's cl compiler and Cygwin's g++ compiler on the same system, with a build script that compiled using both (with the appropriate arguments for both, of course). But here's something I didn't expect - the Cygwin compiled version does actually work! I expected it to choke on the Windows API stuff since I didn't think it would have the appropriate header files and libraries, but it seems I was wrong. I can't speak as to whether g++ will compile the latest version of the code - I'm not up to that point yet! - but it certainly compiles the black-and-white flashing window code from Day 2, and the resulting executable works as expected (when run inside Cygwin, of course).
Again, thanks so much for this project! I'm really looking forward to our next HMH session. :D