You could get the STL Tutorial and Reference Guide which will get you started with templates Meyer's Exceptional STL and Exceptional C++ will help. Herb Sutter's Exceptional C++ Style will get you going. Then you'll be ready for C++ Template Metaprogramming by Abrahams and Gurtovnoy. As a mathematician you'd probably enjoy Elements of Programming by Stepanov and McJones which teaches you a LOT about template programming.

Ubuntu always makes their new releases available via torrents because it spreads the load across a bigger part of the internet. It works well. Most places, like YouTube, won't restart file transfers (although that's upload I know, I just wish it worked as well as a torrent transfer). I wish they would. torrent transfers don't care about losing connections, they just pick up later. Much more resilient.

Get the ARRL Handbook. Full of tutorial and information about radio electronics. It's a big giant fat book of lovliness

I've programmed in both for years, and the syntax of python is much more complicated than C.

They're only saying that he violated a policy, and recommending counseling for the kid and parents to spin their idiocy into something else. The guy at the school should be fired for giving an example to the kids of not taking responsibility for his own actions.

This sounds like great fun, but programming in Scheme won't help him move to C. It will put him into a off the main path eddy in the computing world, where only AI and lilypond (both of which I love) live. I wish you'd redo GNU robots in C++.

Why not learn C? It's as easy to learn as basic and pascal or python, or php.

It's not hard to figure out that this is not a deterrent to drunk driving. The DA said, "It's not a magic bullet that's going to end DWIs, but its something to make people think twice before they get behind the wheel of a car and drive while they're intoxicated." People drunk enough to exhibit driving that will get them pulled over for drunk driving are not going to be thinking about twitter! They think of things like, where's my keys? Oh, in my hand? Hold it steady, hold it steady, get the key in the slot. The real reason for this, is the same as most things that DAs publish press releases for. They want to LOOK tough on crime. It makes it easier to get budgets and in counties that elect DAs easier to get elected.

The cool part is that I haven't gotten the upgrade for my Blackberry because Verizon wanted me to download it to microcrap or Mac. I'm a Linux guy. So--I still have google.