Learning Curve

I started learning C programming in, or around, 1991. Up until that point, I had been exposed to Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, and (I think) Prolog. C was… somewhat of an eye-opener. Anyone who has had to come to grips with pointers and memory management in C, will know what I mean (and thank goodness for the Borland C IDE help system - unparalleled as a learning tool).

At University, we had papers that required learning a functional language and assembler, but neither of these were like the screaming brick wall that I hit in my second year when I decided to learn C.

Actually, since then, I can’t think of a single technology where I’ve experienced a similarly steep learning curve.

Until LaTeX.

I knew what LaTeX was, of course. But neither had the need, nor in fact, the interest, in learning it before. But after deciding I needed to move SWFK out of the atrocious (and, from an automation perspective, useless) word processing format it’s in at the moment; and after a few aborted attempts to get some reasonable output from various docbook toolsets, I’ve been provided with just the incentive.

But the learning curve is excrutiating.

Get one thing working, and the next thing stops. Change this and effect that. It was all me, of course. There’s nothing wrong with LaTeX after you get used to how it works. But, oh that learning curve. I haven’t felt such a need to scream and yell at my computer in a decade.

This is not to say things are perfect now. I still can’t get the front cover to look centered (advice from a LaTeX guru would be greatly appreciated) and, at times, LaTeX seems to think it knows, better than I do, where to put figures. Working out how to put visible spaces in a \verbatim block is also proving a little challenging. But the overall result does look, in my opinion, much nicer.

Anyone interested in proofreading the new version, please let me know.