David's Tutorials

A quick guide to the using the C programming environment on the school's server.

CSS2 came out in 1998 and XHTML came out in 2000. Browsers which support them well -- including Mozilla 1.0, Konqueror 3, and Opera 7 -- have been out for over a year, and in the cases of Mozilla and Konqueror, alpha builds have been publicly available for years beforehand.

I'm tired of having to point budding developers towards tutorials which promote the old, obsolete way of doing things (actually a fractured mess of several different obsolete ways of doing things). So, I wrote a tutorial to give readers a good starting point for doing HTML the modern way before leading them into older tutorials: by learning XML first. This doesn't cover everything and it is not intended to, but it is meant as a starting ground for rookie developers.

For one of my programming projects, I needed a programming library that had XSLT and XPath parsers. Since Perl's XML libraries wouldn't install on my machine and I didn't have the patience to make them install, I chose the LibXML2 library for C. Beyond being free, this library has the prestige of underpinning the Gnome desktop.

Unfortunately, I found the LibXML2 documentation to be lacking, so I wrote my own tutorial. It assumes you already have a fair understanding of C, XML, and XSLT.

There are many things you don't learn in a classroom but from experience instead. After having to devise a complex incantation for a work need, I recorded some of the useful things I discovered along the way.

Back when I had the time to play video games, one of my favourites was Hell Fighter by David Peterson. I joined the fan mailing list and every other week it seemed someone was asking how to create new .hfb mission files. The .hfb format did not seem difficult to learn -- I picked it up quickly by looking at the missions the game came with -- but since others needed documentation, and there were gaps in my knowledge that I wanted to clear up, I made this tutorial.