{/begin}
My First academic semester at UF just ended yesterday. And I was so happy that I did not sleep yesterday night. Weirdo am I?
I would like to pass on some information about useful stuffs one should know if you have something to do with Computer Science in general. Perhaps this is pretty vague and may be redundant - but still you can take it as a preaching hah :)
{/end}
MiKTeX - Let me take this first. Well, in case you have not heard yet about LaTeX, its high time you get to know what it is about. If you write long documents, have a knack for preparing them beautifully and could not quench your thirst with popular word processing tools available - go for it.
Well, just for the fact to get the dates straight - TeX was written in late 70's and is much popular in the academia domain. The typesetting system was developed by Donald Knuth and many others contributed to it along with support for all major operating systems.
The TeX file looks kind of a html file but is strongly typed. Most of the commands start with a backslash. The file (usually stored in .tex format) gets compiled into a DVI format (DeVice Independent). The DVI file can be sent as input to printer drivers or converted to pdf or postscript formats.
All these formats are standard formats which can be used without explicitly obtaining any licenses from any proprietary sources - This is the best part.
Sadly for novice users, afaIk TeX does not support WYSIWUG formats. So there are two options - one can take existing pre-written files and change stuffs as per one's requirements. Take a smaller version - there are plenty available, all you have to do is forget being lazy and google for .tex files. Of course any worthwhile task consumes time before giving results.
Or, you may write down from scratch. Remember to make a lot of tex files for specific purpose - which will prove to very useful for future modification. Its very tedious to read 1000 lines of tex code as it is to interpret a 1000 lines of html spaghetti.
You can include these smaller tex files into a single tex file. This file can actually contain only 10 lines and these lines are nothing but inclusions of 10 specific tex files. Remember, the order is important as in any C program.
It is not just about mathematics - why one should use tex. The problem is with over repeating things. You always wanted to do things once and use shortcuts the next time. Word Processing offers so many shortcuts - that they literally abuse it. You struggle with things which should have been simple. They break that rule that things should be simple, but no simpler - and I just abused Occam's Razor.
Hope you get it. Perhaps on a Sunday, when you feel like trying out some good stuff, give this a try. I installed it on MS Windows. Go to MiKTeX Home Page. Lots of Documentation is available. Read the Installation properly because you would not like to mess it up. I downloaded the complete installation from a local mirror available with UF. A recommended editor from this website is WinEdt. Try it out. You may go for other installations of LaTeX. Tell me about it if you know something is really good.
Next Blog would be on few video lecture courses in Computer Science - highly recommended for students in the bachelors' program. I am currently viewing the course lectures. Once completed I would post complete information about it.
My First academic semester at UF just ended yesterday. And I was so happy that I did not sleep yesterday night. Weirdo am I?
I would like to pass on some information about useful stuffs one should know if you have something to do with Computer Science in general. Perhaps this is pretty vague and may be redundant - but still you can take it as a preaching hah :)
{/end}
MiKTeX - Let me take this first. Well, in case you have not heard yet about LaTeX, its high time you get to know what it is about. If you write long documents, have a knack for preparing them beautifully and could not quench your thirst with popular word processing tools available - go for it.
Well, just for the fact to get the dates straight - TeX was written in late 70's and is much popular in the academia domain. The typesetting system was developed by Donald Knuth and many others contributed to it along with support for all major operating systems.
The TeX file looks kind of a html file but is strongly typed. Most of the commands start with a backslash. The file (usually stored in .tex format) gets compiled into a DVI format (DeVice Independent). The DVI file can be sent as input to printer drivers or converted to pdf or postscript formats.
All these formats are standard formats which can be used without explicitly obtaining any licenses from any proprietary sources - This is the best part.
Sadly for novice users, afaIk TeX does not support WYSIWUG formats. So there are two options - one can take existing pre-written files and change stuffs as per one's requirements. Take a smaller version - there are plenty available, all you have to do is forget being lazy and google for .tex files. Of course any worthwhile task consumes time before giving results.
Or, you may write down from scratch. Remember to make a lot of tex files for specific purpose - which will prove to very useful for future modification. Its very tedious to read 1000 lines of tex code as it is to interpret a 1000 lines of html spaghetti.
You can include these smaller tex files into a single tex file. This file can actually contain only 10 lines and these lines are nothing but inclusions of 10 specific tex files. Remember, the order is important as in any C program.
It is not just about mathematics - why one should use tex. The problem is with over repeating things. You always wanted to do things once and use shortcuts the next time. Word Processing offers so many shortcuts - that they literally abuse it. You struggle with things which should have been simple. They break that rule that things should be simple, but no simpler - and I just abused Occam's Razor.
Hope you get it. Perhaps on a Sunday, when you feel like trying out some good stuff, give this a try. I installed it on MS Windows. Go to MiKTeX Home Page. Lots of Documentation is available. Read the Installation properly because you would not like to mess it up. I downloaded the complete installation from a local mirror available with UF. A recommended editor from this website is WinEdt. Try it out. You may go for other installations of LaTeX. Tell me about it if you know something is really good.
Next Blog would be on few video lecture courses in Computer Science - highly recommended for students in the bachelors' program. I am currently viewing the course lectures. Once completed I would post complete information about it.
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