XGB: Computer Programming and Software Development

This page is designed to be a portal to another website that will eventually contain many tutorials and "white papers" describing in detail some computer programming projects taken on by XGB Design, along with source code listings for each project. For the time being there is one project on tap, and it's a big one: an extensive seven-part tutorial demonstrating creation of a C++ program that implements a simple but powerful command-line calculator called The Tiny RPN Calculator. (You can also access this project by clicking on the image at left.) Seven drafts of the program are presented here, each draft showing how the calculator can be extended using object-oriented techniques in C++. It's hoped that both student and professional programmers will enjoy surveying this project.

XGB Design's Gordon Brown has pursued computer programming at the hobbyist level—and sometimes beyond—for over thirty years. An entirely self-taught programmer, he began in 1978 by writing a program to perform earthwork estimation on a Hewlett-Packard 97 programmable calculator. The program was subsequently adopted for use at VTN in Orange County, a civil-engineering firm where he worked at the time. After working through several dialects of the BASIC programming language, Gordon has programmed extensively in C, C++, and C# since 1988. In 2006 he added the technologies of XHTML, CSS, XML, and JavaScript programming for Web development. Also in 2006, Gordon used the C# language and Windows® API to produce an auction-managing program for a company that auctions musical and celebrity autographs and other memorabilia. In early 2010 he began a foray into functional languages by studying Scheme and Haskell, the latter of which has rapidly become one of his favorite languages. Gordon's current languages of choice are C++ and Haskell, but he's already exploring the possibilities of adding D, Erlang, and Scala to the repertoire, along with the jQuery JavaScript library for web development.