On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 05:46:04PM +0000, Mayuresh Kathe via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 17:33:18 UTC, Gary Willoughby wrote:
> >On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 17:15:28 UTC, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
> >>Okay, if that is the case, I'll dive into Mr. Alexandrescu's book as soon as I get my copy.
> >
> >No need to wait that long. I second H.S. Teoh's suggestion to recommend reading this book too:
> >
> >http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/intro.html
> >
> >It's free, downloadable and right up to date.
> 
> Yes, prima-facie it definitely looks good.
> Will start off with it while I await delivery of Andrei's book to my
> location.

Keep in mind that there's an errata for Andrei's book:

	http://erdani.com/tdpl/errata/


T

-- 
Life would be easier if I had the source code. -- YHL

On 12/02/2014 09:15 AM, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:

> BTW, how come all of you address him as Andrei?
> Is this group that informal?

First name is the normal way of referring to colleagues here in the US, at least in Silicon Valley. Even the CEOs, board members, and all the other "top" people are referred to by their first names, even in person.

Ali

On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 16:38:34 UTC, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
> While I have been a programmer for close to 23 years, it's been mostly API level code cobbling work.
>
> Would like to learn "D", but am a bit intimidated by the fact that I don't have much of a grasp over the foundational stuff (discrete mathematics, machine organization, etc.) and hence am preparing for the same.
>
> Would like to know if there be anything else I should work through before approaching "D" via Mr. Alexandrescu's book.
>
> Thanks.

An interesting thing about D (that C++ shares to a degree) is that it is sufficiently high level that you can write programs while knowing nothing about the underlying machine. At the same time (again, like C++) it is sufficiently low level that you have full access to the machine's capabilities if you want to use them. If you want to write an operating system in D, you will need to know about machine organization. If you are writing a command-line utility to process text, you don't need to know or care about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 10:45 PM, Mayuresh Kathe via Digitalmars-d-learn <digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com> wrote:
> Okay, if that is the case, I'll dive into Mr. Alexandrescu's book as soon as
> I get my copy.
> BTW, how come all of you address him as Andrei?

Heh -- possibly you haven't interacted on international technical mailing lists like this. For us (you and me) in India we are used to employ/expect such honorifics, and in fact it would be considered somewhat disrespectful if we didn't, but in my early days interacting with people from "western" countries on the net, I was actually discouraged from using "Mr" because it made people feel "old"! :-)

FWIW while we're talking honorifics, he's *Dr* Alexandrescu as in Ph D doc. :-) [I'm one too, but you won't find me having mentioned it anywhere earlier! :-) That's informal.]

Re Andrei's book versus Ali's, the latter is a more starting from the basics approach whereas Andrei's book is more targeted at people coming from other languages. (This is a judgment I read somewhere -- perhaps on this forum? -- and which I agree with, sorta.)

-- 
Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा

On Wednesday, 3 December 2014 at 02:41:16 UTC, Shriramana Sharma via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 10:45 PM, Mayuresh Kathe via
> Digitalmars-d-learn <digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> Okay, if that is the case, I'll dive into Mr. Alexandrescu's book as soon as
>> I get my copy.
>> BTW, how come all of you address him as Andrei?
>
> Heh -- possibly you haven't interacted on international technical
> mailing lists like this. For us (you and me) in India we are used to
> employ/expect such honorifics, and in fact it would be considered
> somewhat disrespectful if we didn't, but in my early days interacting
> with people from "western" countries on the net, I was actually
> discouraged from using "Mr" because it made people feel "old"! :-)
>
> FWIW while we're talking honorifics, he's *Dr* Alexandrescu as in Ph D
> doc. :-) [I'm one too, but you won't find me having mentioned it
> anywhere earlier! :-) That's informal.]
>
> Re Andrei's book versus Ali's, the latter is a more starting from the
> basics approach whereas Andrei's book is more targeted at people
> coming from other languages. (This is a judgment I read somewhere --
> perhaps on this forum? -- and which I agree with, sorta.)

yes, you are totally right. Ali's book is aiming at teaching D language to complete beginners where Andrei's book is aiming at teaching D language to people who are already programmers.

On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 21:10:33 UTC, Meta wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 December 2014 at 16:38:34 UTC, Mayuresh Kathe wrote:
>> While I have been a programmer for close to 23 years, it's been mostly API level code cobbling work.
>>
>> Would like to learn "D", but am a bit intimidated by the fact that I don't have much of a grasp over the foundational stuff (discrete mathematics, machine organization, etc.) and hence am preparing for the same.
>>
>> Would like to know if there be anything else I should work through before approaching "D" via Mr. Alexandrescu's book.
>>
>> Thanks.
>
> An interesting thing about D (that C++ shares to a degree) is that it is sufficiently high level that you can write programs while knowing nothing about the underlying machine. At the same time (again, like C++) it is sufficiently low level that you have full access to the machine's capabilities if you want to use them. If you want to write an operating system in D, you will need to know about machine organization. If you are writing a command-line utility to process text, you don't need to know or care about the specifics of the underlying hardware.

And don't forget - and I'll say this again and again - the modeling power of D. Machines are only as intelligent as we make them (not talking about Terminator or The Matrix here!) and D is a good tool to make a machine work like reality.