SwarmFest2005/Tutorial/Message

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Message

A Paul's message to Swarm Tutorial Students:

It is not possible for you to learn all nuances and details of Swarm in a single afternoon. You can, however, gain a solid understanding of the kinds of problems for which Swarm programs have proven useful and some ideas about how you might apply these models in your own research.

I think the best way to prepare for the tutorial is to find a computer that has Swarm-2.2 installed, or install it for yourself, and then try to download the swarmapps-objc package of demonstration programs. In particular, inside that package, there is a step-by-step tutorial for Swarm. If you read through the README files in those directories, and perhaps try to compile and run some of the examples, I think it will give you a good frame of mind for the tutorial.

If you can't get access to a computer that has a working copy of Swarm, I'd urge you to take a couple of steps in preparation. First, get a good book on the C programming language. If you can find a book that has the coverage of Objective-C as well, such as Steven Kochan's recent book, "Programming with Objective-C" then that will be fine. But the Objective-C part is not really necessary. After you understand C, you can download a free book from the Apple website. That's the one we colloquially call “the objective-C book” because, for a long time, it was the only book to be found on the subject. I keep a copy of that book stashed here: http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn/ps905/ObjC.pdf

If you've only used programs before, but never written one, you will have to travel up a steep learning curve. I've made that transition myself, and would urge you to be patient and to keep trying. I think the best thing you could do for yourself is to avoid using MS Windows. Get a Unix or Linux Operating system of some sort, or get a Macintosh OS X, because that is a BSD Unix system underneath. I've seen it with my own eyes—you can open up a terminal and interact with it as if it were really a Unix system. MS Windows is still too frustrating for me. I understand, lots of people use it, but that doesn't mean its right.

When I come to the Swarm tutorial, I'll bring some installation disks for the Fedora Core Linux distribution. If you want to erase a laptop, or if you have some free space, I'll walk you through an installation. Contact me ahead of time, we can schedule that. I'll be in Torino by June 4.