Introduction to Programming with C# - new book at the horizon!

сряда, 25 ноември 2009 г.

A few days ago Svetlin Nakov announced that we are starting a new open-source project - writing an introductory book about programming in C# language. It will be based on the book, which we have written almost a year ago - "Introduction to Programming with Java".

The book will be based on Visual Studio 2010 and C# 3.0, but won't cover topics such as lambda expressions and extension methods. The main purpose of the book is to teach the readers to think logically. This includes basic knowledge of Algorithms, Complexity, Linear Data Structures, Graphs and Trees, Sets, Object Oriented Programming Concepts, etc.

The book’s official Web site will be located at: http://www.introprogramming.info.

The developer’s Web site is located in Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/introcsharpbook/.

The SVN repository containing all project assets is located at: http://introcsharpbook.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/.

The developer’s mailing list (discussion group) is located at: http://groups.google.com/group/introcsharpbook.

If you want to take part in the project as author or editor, you are welcome to contact either me or Svetlin.

P.S.
I will lead this project, so wish me good luck!

P.P.S.
We are planning to translate the books (both Java and C# editions) in English. If there are eager people joining our next ambitious project, just rise a hand!

Talk at Open Fest 2009 - "Tesseract OCR Engine"

Few weeks ago I had a technical talk along with my colleague Svetlin Nakov about OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and more specifically - Tesseract OCR Engine. The lection was part of the Open Fest 2009, Sofia, Bulgaria and was widely attended.

We shared our practical experience with the Tesseract and the OCR in general as we had just worked on a very complicated project just a few weeks ago.

The presentation includes:
- What is OCR?
- Project Tesseract - history and versions.
- Downloading and compiling Tesseract - live demo.
- How Tesseract works? - an overview of the underlying algorithms.
- Training Tesseract - live demo how to train the engine for custom languages/fonts.
- Comparison with other OCR engines.
- Tesseract's future.

You can download the presentation and the demos.

Thanks,
Vesko Kolev

P.S. As the topic of OCR is really very interesting I am planning to have another post on it showing some further details about Tesseract as well as a sample OCR engine based on some AI algorithms.
Stay tuned!