Pretty much on all accounts I meant "I don't know how to take advantage of x." As I know the difference between the data types and I know the difference between the two memory types and how they work.
Anyway, to one of the points of this post:
My site is back up (ok, it never went down, but the new design is up.) I spent the last 3 or so hours getting everything working on the new design and, as usual, I'm pretty happy with it right now. We all know that I'll probably come back in six hours and go "we hates it precious." Although, I did spend a lot longer working on this design (designed and coded it on and off over the past few weeks) rather than spending a day on it and then uploading it.
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. The links at the top expand (i.e. Links expands down to Developers which expands down to several developers (these are actual links to sites off of the site.) I'll be adding more links and stuff soon.
I read several reviews of 'Fundamentals of C++: Understanding Programming and Problem Solving' stating that this was an excellent book to learn from (even a couple reviews that were supposedly from professors) and to be honest, I'm very worried that this book is used in schools of any sort, especially colleges (it's actually a textbook.)
One of the first things I noticed is that he declares all of his variables at the top of the function, which is a bad thing. He even makes it out to be that this is how things are supposed to be done (in his diagram of the program he displays a rectangle at the top of the function naming it 'declaration section.') Then in his breakdown he states "The declaration section is used to declare (name) variables that are necessary to the program. If a variable is used that has not been declared, an error will occur when the program is compiled."
Another is that they didn't use STL, instead they developed and used their own classes throughout the book (including string, a matrix class, and a linked list class IIRC.) It's a good idea to COVER these things, but I don't see any decent reason why they didn't use STL after discussing the implementation (or even after implementing itself. 'This is how you implement it...now use STL.')
A third thing is that they cover graphics programming...which is a ridiculously shitty idea.
The only good thing this book has going for it is that it's written pretty clearly and has a good layout (each chapter is followed by exercises and such, but that's to be expected with it being a textbook.)
Needless to say, I read this book from front to back, covering several chapters twice, and didn't gain an ounce of knowledge. I'm just glad I got it off of eBay for $10 instead of the $90 or so that it cost from Amazon at the time. I won't say that it's an awful book, it's just not good for beginners and not useful to anyone above beginners ~_^.
'3D Graphics Programming: Games and Beyond' gets a little better review. It's an older book (from 2000) so it's somewhat outdated, but it has the theories down decently. At least I learned a few things from this book as I was reading through it. The only thing I can really say bad about this book (other than outdated stuff) is that I dislike the author's naming convention, but that's just my personal opinion.
Time to find some other books. I'll probably have to buy some, as most of my books predate 2001. However, I am pretty happy to learn that I seem to know more than I thought I did ^_^.
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Site has been tested in:
Firefox 1.5 (thanks to dcosborn)
Firefox 2.0
Internet Explorer 7 (login form looks a little odd, but works fine.)
Opera 9.1 & 9.23 (login form looks a little odd, but works fine.)
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On a side note, I'd like to warn everybody. I seem to be having someone target me, as in the past few months 3 of my email accounts have been cracked, someone got a hold of my bank account number, and now someone has been logging into my XBox Live account. So, if you get anything from 'me' (or an email from an email @dragonforgetechnology.com) that is...bad, then I apologize (if you do, please send me a private message.) Whoever has gotten into my mail server seems to be spamming email out through it and I can't seem to stop them. I'm going to contact godaddy to see if they can do anything about it. Also, whoever logged into my XBox Live account deleted all of my friends, so I'm going to send out new friend requests (I seem to have stopped it thankfully.)
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Ok, added the recent content module, added different entry types (kind of like tags, but within my abilities lol), and changed the main page so that it displays the last 10 entries (no matter the entry type.) Click the Entry Type link at the top and then choose an entry type to get specific entries. At the moment I only have News and Game Design, but I'll add other stuff later on.
It's 7 and I have to work at 3:30, so I'm going to sleep now I guess. Bastard work always getting in the way :(
The expanding links on your site are a nice idea. I've never seen it done like that before. In case you need to know, looks good under Firefox 1.5.