I’ve watched how my thirteen year old son goes about to acquire information about things online. I am astonished how he time and time again deliberately chooses to get it from a video on YouTube rather than trying to find the best written documentation for whatever he’s looking for. I just have to accept that some people, even some descendants in my own family tree, prefer video as a source of information. And I realize he’s not alone.

So therefore, I bring you, the…

libcurl video tutorial

My intent is to record a series of short and fairly independent episodes, each detailing a specific libcurl area. A particular “thing”, feature, option or area of the APIs. Each episode is also thoroughly documented and all the source code seen on the video is available on the site so that viewers can either follow along while viewing, or go back to the code afterward as a reference. Or both!

I’ve done the four first episodes so far, and they range from five minutes to nineteen minutes a piece. I expect that it might take me a while to just complete the list of episodes I could come up with myself. I also hope and expect that readers and viewers will think of other areas that I could cover so the list of video episodes could easily expand over time.

Feedback

If you have comments on the episodes. If you have suggestion of what to improve or subjects to cover, head over to the libcurl-video-tutorials github page and file an issue or two!

Video setup

I use a Debian Linux installation to develop on. I figure it should be similar enough to many other systems.

Video wise, in each episode I show you my text editor for code, a terminal window for building the code, running what we build in the episode and also for looking up man page information etc. And a small image of myself. Behind those three squares, there’s a photo of a forest (taken by me).

I plan to make each episode use the same basic visuals.

In the initial “setup” episode I create a generic Makefile, which we can reuse in several (all?) other episodes to build the example code easily and swiftly. I’ve previously learned that people consider Makefiles difficult, or sometimes even magic, to work with so I wanted to get that out of the way from the start and then focus more directly on actual C code that uses libcurl.

Receive data episode

Here’s the “receive data” episode as an example of how this can look.

The link: https://bagder.github.io/libcurl-video-tutorials/