Discuss The MagPi - Issue 03 July 2012

Issue 03 of The MagPi has been released (30/06/2012)
Get it from:
http://www.themagpi.com



This thread is intended to cover any discussions/problems/questions anyone may have about this particular issue of the magazine ONLY
(Please see other threads for other releases)

If you have a general question, query or wish to help-out, then you can contact us directly via the website or post in the following discussion.
The MagPi Magazine discussion Thread

All the releases of The MagPi are available on Issuu.com (flash required) including the "working draft" of the next issue!

I hope everyone enjoy's this latest issue. Since I wasn't involved with the games/app testing, I will be interested to hear people's recommendations for good games on the Rpi.

There is a slight problem with the examples in the Command Line Clinic. The examples will not work if you have any C programs in your home directory.

If the following command does not work
find / -name *.c
you should use any of the following
find / -name "*.c"
find / -name '*.c'
find / -name \*.c

I tried to keep the examples as simple as possible by reducing the number of characters per line, but I went a bit too far.

For more details, see the following comment that I received from Andy F.

Hi,

It's great to see a beginners' introduction to the UNIX shell in the
magazine but even at that level it is important to get the basics
right.

In the Command Line Clinic in issue 3, the find command is introduced to
search for C programs in the system using

find / -name *.c

This will work fine if there are no files in the user's current working
directory that match *.c but otherwise the shell will expand the *.c
before invoking the find command and you won't get the results you expect.

Please always teach people to quote the argument or escape the * with a
backslash.

find / -name '*.c'
find / -name \*.c

Keep up the good work, my 7-year-old enjoys reading the magpi and trying
out the programs!

I'd like to thank Meltwater for the ingenious idea of having the kid I'm trying to get excited about electronics start off by building a lego housing for his Pi. The idea that the device is 'theirs' is essential, because you might find yourself taking it off them to examine it now and then, and it needs to remain 'their' toy.

Then, by introducing them to scratch, which is colourful and has instant effect (kids don't want to wait for compiling/testing, they are so impatient) I've created a genuine spark of excitement about programming!