Archive for the ‘ Development Links ’ Category

Floating Point Guide

I came across a great article about the pit falls of using floating point numbers in programming. All to often software bugs come up because developers expect something like 0.1+0.2==0.3. The article goes into very clear detail as to why it is not the case that we can expect exact equality while using float point representations.

MySQL and Java common problem

Have you ever received the following error while using Java and MySQL:

You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '????????????????' at line 1

This is a common error when you first set up Java and MySQL to work together. To correct it simply add the following lines of code to your my.cnf in the section [mysqld]

collation_server=utf8_general_ci
character_set_server=utf8

Great C Tutorial

Dr. Dave Marshall at Cardiff School of Computer Science has written a great C tutorial. This tutorial is mostly aimed at UNIX C developers and covers the basics of C programming to advanced multi-threaded application development. This is the tutorial that I used to learn C and I still open it up whenever I need to look up something new or need a quick refresher on something. Unfortunately it appears that Google keeps burying the link so I thought it would be helpful to others that are looking for in my opinion the best C tutorial available online.