While writing code on paper is unrealistic I think it is a good discipline, especially for intro CS courses. I actually credit my early success and rapid absorption of C++ to the fact that my intro CS professor made us take weekly handwritten quizzes and gave us a written final where we were expected to write a program with several small classes and data structures that worked together. When you are being held accountable for the material like that it forces you to know wtf you are doing and not just use IntelliSense and compiler warnings to blunder through the language on the fly.
Over the last 2 years my University's CS department has been rapidly dumbing itself down. Letting in unqualified students, making it easy to pass intro courses that used to be difficult, teaching to the lowest common denominator. Part of this process has been a switch from the written tests and quizzes to testing on computers with compilers. Go figure.
I do think that this is only appropriate for intro courses where students need to rapidly develop a grasp of a programming language and concepts so they can move on to the good stuff. Beyond the intro level they should really be teaching higher level concepts, stuff that is programming-language independent and impractical to code on an exam. If you are asked a question about an algorithm, you should be able to use pseudocode (I have never run into problems using very-pseudocode in upper-division CS courses, as long as I knew what I was doing). A good exam should ask you to think and apply the material and a decent instructor will recognize if you've done this.
Seriously, if you are a CS student you should be able to write an algorithm on paper, but it is kind of a skill in itself... Writing C++ on my intro final was not so bad because we had written weekly quizzes and were used to doing it, but if a professor asked for a large hand-written program out of nowhere, I imagine losing the safety net of a compiler would freak some people out. It made plenty of my classmates fail:)
Take a look at Metrowerks Codewarrior.
It's a real, heavy-duty, established IDE for professional C/C++ development, and it just happens to support Java as well.
I started using it after Visual Cafe drove me nearly insane. I've also tried JBuilder, Visual J++ (which is pretty well dead now), and JEdit (which is a simplish editor written in Java that plugs into the JDK for compiling and running your apps). Before I started using Codewarrior I had decided that the available Java IDEs were so bad that it was less trouble to use a simple text editor and run the JDK from the command line.
Something that I consider a plus with CW is that it uses Sun's JDK rather than it's own compiler (which was kind of an annoyance with VCafe, being tied to them for updates), so it is more or less just their IDE set up to use Sun's compiler and VM.
I ended up liking CW so much for Java that I've also started doing my C/C++ programming with it, although the fact that I now work for a company that uses CW for Mac and PC C++ developent has encouraged me to become familiar with it. One of the biggest plusses for me is that you can choose to turn off MDI (multiple document interface), which I consider to be one of the worst and most frustrating GUI concepts ever, especially when you have a Big Ass Monitor.
It also has RAD GUI tools but I have not used them so I cannot comment on their usefullness.
No need to get it through Manga. Just go to your local Japanese video store and rent it. It's almost all in English, and the stuff that's in Japanese isn't very important to the plot (not that it has one), although I'm sure Manga won't miss the opportunity to do a horrible dubbing job ( Blood's english voice acting was better than most of the dubbing you get from American distributors).
I don't know what the big deal about the animation is either. It looks very similar to what they did with Ghost in the Shell, and actually I think some of the attempts at photorealistic backgrounds look funny. They are claiming it's "Japan's first full-digital animated feature" whatever.... The art was hand drawn, scanned and then painted and manipulated digitally... I think Ghibli did the same thing with Mononoke Hime.
The REALLY interesting Japanese application of computer graphics is Furi Curi (FLCL) from Gainax (the guys who did Evangelion, Nadia and Wings of Honneamise). THAT is some freakin amazing stuff.
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Over the last 2 years my University's CS department has been rapidly dumbing itself down. Letting in unqualified students, making it easy to pass intro courses that used to be difficult, teaching to the lowest common denominator. Part of this process has been a switch from the written tests and quizzes to testing on computers with compilers. Go figure.
I do think that this is only appropriate for intro courses where students need to rapidly develop a grasp of a programming language and concepts so they can move on to the good stuff. Beyond the intro level they should really be teaching higher level concepts, stuff that is programming-language independent and impractical to code on an exam. If you are asked a question about an algorithm, you should be able to use pseudocode (I have never run into problems using very-pseudocode in upper-division CS courses, as long as I knew what I was doing). A good exam should ask you to think and apply the material and a decent instructor will recognize if you've done this. Seriously, if you are a CS student you should be able to write an algorithm on paper, but it is kind of a skill in itself... Writing C++ on my intro final was not so bad because we had written weekly quizzes and were used to doing it, but if a professor asked for a large hand-written program out of nowhere, I imagine losing the safety net of a compiler would freak some people out. It made plenty of my classmates fail :)
I started using it after Visual Cafe drove me nearly insane. I've also tried JBuilder, Visual J++ (which is pretty well dead now), and JEdit (which is a simplish editor written in Java that plugs into the JDK for compiling and running your apps). Before I started using Codewarrior I had decided that the available Java IDEs were so bad that it was less trouble to use a simple text editor and run the JDK from the command line.
Something that I consider a plus with CW is that it uses Sun's JDK rather than it's own compiler (which was kind of an annoyance with VCafe, being tied to them for updates), so it is more or less just their IDE set up to use Sun's compiler and VM. I ended up liking CW so much for Java that I've also started doing my C/C++ programming with it, although the fact that I now work for a company that uses CW for Mac and PC C++ developent has encouraged me to become familiar with it. One of the biggest plusses for me is that you can choose to turn off MDI (multiple document interface), which I consider to be one of the worst and most frustrating GUI concepts ever, especially when you have a Big Ass Monitor.
It also has RAD GUI tools but I have not used them so I cannot comment on their usefullness.
Nick
No need to get it through Manga. Just go to your local Japanese video store and rent it. It's almost all in English, and the stuff that's in Japanese isn't very important to the plot (not that it has one), although I'm sure Manga won't miss the opportunity to do a horrible dubbing job ( Blood's english voice acting was better than most of the dubbing you get from American distributors).
I don't know what the big deal about the animation is either. It looks very similar to what they did with Ghost in the Shell, and actually I think some of the attempts at photorealistic backgrounds look funny. They are claiming it's "Japan's first full-digital animated feature" whatever.... The art was hand drawn, scanned and then painted and manipulated digitally... I think Ghibli did the same thing with Mononoke Hime.
The REALLY interesting Japanese application of computer graphics is Furi Curi (FLCL) from Gainax (the guys who did Evangelion, Nadia and Wings of Honneamise). THAT is some freakin amazing stuff.