The Pasture of C++ Notes

A while ago I needed to learn a programming language. But which one? There's a lot to choose from. Baffled and confused, I took a piece of advice from a computer scientist friend: "C++, because once you learn that, all other languages will follow". Nice and simple, now to learn it.

A lot of graduate students will start their studies without knowing a great deal of programming languages. This means that when they start, they need to learn it. So most places put on computing lectures for these students as soon as they start and, most of the time, they put it on the internet.

The following resource is, as it says, from the DESY Summer School. The notes you can get are a pdf of the slides/handouts that were used in the lectures. As always, lecture notes are quick to the point and they won't go unnecessarily out of the way. For example, the language FORTRAN is described as VW Beetle, whereas C++ is described as a Formula 1. Nice and snappy, but I think a more amusing comparison would be a plain to one of those ribbed things... Regardless, here it is:

https://www.desy.de/~blist/summerstudents/c++-intro-10-offhandout.pdf

A drawback of the notes is that they may not go into enough detail. That's why you can use another resource along side it. The cplusplus website has a really good tutorial that you can also download as a pdf:

http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

To actually do the code you need a compiler. So I followed more advise from the computer scientist friend: "use Linux because it just works" - Ubuntu and g++! If you aren't a fan of the above two resources, try these out too: C++ Intro and C++ Reference.

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The YouTube VT Round

Sometimes I cringe when I think about all the time that I’ve wasted on YouTube watching the sneezing panda video. But, YouTube has a lot of physics videos too. The only problem is, it also has a lot of crap physics videos. With a little bit of exploring, you can uncover the really good ones. Here’s some of the best ones that you can watch in less than 5 minutes.

MinutePhysics

By searching physics, the MinutePhysics channel actually does have a high chance of coming in the top 10 results. It’s not surprising really, as it’s easily the best channel that explicitly states physics in the name. The videos are just a hand drawing simplistic cartoon pictures, whilst a voice narrates you through. A nice aspect of this style is that the voice feels right, in a way that a voice like Extreme Makeover host, Ty Pennington, simply wouldn’t. Neil Turok has done the voice on at least one of the videos (he’s the director of the Perimeter Institute). Without going into heavy descriptions, MinutePhysics is able to explain some hardcore topics. Take parallel universes for example:

Smarter Every Day

The Alabama man behind SED is called Destin. His mantra is “I try to get Smarter Every Day, and make fun science videos sharing my progress”. He spends a lot of time on his videos, and you can really tell. His friends and family once had intervention with the theme “Bro’s before YouTube”. I know this because he recorded it, and put it on YouTube. Regardless of the intervention, there’s some diamond VT on his channel, this was the first one that I ever watched:

Others

Often I've come across some VT that's looked ridgy didge, but has gone straight onto the junk pile. In particular, the 100 second videos by Physics World - so so boring. Here's some other good videos of interest: Veritasium, Fermilab and, if you feel brave enough for the Glasgow accent, Glesga Physics. 

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