2008 Aug 06 - Wed

Labour Saving Devices (Software Wise)

Today's Dr. Dobb's Report via email from Jonathan Erickson has a reference to Michael Abrash's book Graphics Programming Black Book. Based upon the book's table of content, the content covers many interesting algorithms in and outside of graphics programming.

However, to download the book, one has to download over 76 individual files. What a pain, especially if one is using Windows.

Actually, it isn't so bad. I manually downloaded the preludes and afterwords. Cygwin came to the rescue for automating the chapter downloads. By starting a Cygwin shell, putting the following content in a file called 'getch', and running it, I was able to automate the download of the 70 individual chapters. For those running Linux or BSD directly, then this little script can be used directly.

for (( i = 1; i <= 70; i++ ))
do
  wget http://www.byte.com/abrash/chapters/gpbb$i.pdf
done

The 'wget' program is a useful tool for downloading web pages without using a browser. And by creating a for loop with a variable substitution, one can iteratively download each of the chapters.