I'm sorry. I'm sure you're a fine programmer, but that was hilarious, if subtle.

Not intended to be a joke, though I'm sure it is funny to all those unfortunate souls who had unqualified computer science teachers in high school. I apologize for the generally low quality of my colleagues.

My comment was mostly because I've been helping out a bit with bug reports and minor fixes for the Ogg Vorbis audio codec. Recently there was some discussion about an integer-only implementation of the codec and one of the developers said, "Get me a good integer MDCT with > 100dB of S/N (that's the hard part; I wrote one but it only has about 80) and I'll deliver the rest." That made me think, "You know, if I'd actually done any homework in my linear algebra class in college, I'd have a go at that." Of course I didn't, and so now that lack of fundamentals prevents me from coding such things.

To try to return even remotely to the topic, I'm quite the fan of Perl. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to learn from the "Programming Perl" book vs. the "Learning Perl" assuming you can already program well in some C-like language.

References:
+[See Jack's comment on the MDCT at http://www.xiph.org/archives/vorbis-dev/0059.html ]
+[Download Ogg Vorbis (it's better than mp3) at
http://www.vorbis.com/ ]


This comment was edited on Jan 21, 11:55.