@jackp wrote:
I did the usual thing of diving into something new (OpenFrameworks in this case) knowing very little about something critical (C++ in this case!). I’m not new to coding, but I’ve never coded full-time / professionally so quickly hit roadblocks when tackling something in this way. I hit pause on my OF experiments and headed off to learn C++ as quickly as I could. I’ve been surprised to find out that I really like learning from (well made) video courses - I like feeling like I’m at a lecture and I keep pausing and making lots of notes as I go. I found a fantastic free course that I’m sure lots of you know about, but thought I’d share anyway. It’s on Udemy (maybe OF doesn’t like promoting Udemy stuff - undertand why) and for me, is the perfect pairing for an OF beginner.
https://www.udemy.com/course/free-learn-c-tutorial-beginners/learn/lecture/1348876?start=0#overview
The tutor (John Purcell) covers the trickier topics of pointers, memory management etc. really well and there’s a full pass of object oriented patterns. The huge bonus from my perspective is the ultimate focus on graphics of the project towards the end - it covers low level creation and manipulation of 32bit RGBA colors, bitwise shift and AND operators, buffers, screen coordinates, buffer swapping through the creation of a box blur filter from scratch - all through SDL2, a C++ media library often used to create games.
I’ve just completed this course (at 1.5x!) and loved it and John’s delivery. I feel really prepared to switch back to my OF projects, and plan to do his advanced C++ course next.
The course is a few years old, but everything worked, compiled and ran perfectly (me on Pop!OS Linux using VSCode). Apologies if this has been posted before here, I searched and didn’t find it. Hope it’s of use to someone.
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