Modes (Patreon)

This weekend I'm focusing on the chapter about modes. If I can get that done, it'll be a major triumph & a milestone achievement for the book, because modes are a hairy and difficult subject -- right now I'm compiling LaTeX and wondering why a script that worked 2 days ago stopped working today. (???). I know I'll eventually figure it out, but this is the mundane everyday frustration of programming... and everything else. Computers: our best friends when they work, our worst enemy when they don't.

I hope you're all having a wonderful weekend.
~ Ian

P.S. does anyone know a really excellent software package for making graphs? I'm currently using JPGraph (https://jpgraph.net/) and it's giving me grief about changing the fill colour of bar charts. I'm willing to switch to another library, because at the moment I only have 5 charts in the book and it's easy to render the data into JSON or XML or whatever. Must have some way to construct and render as a saved PNG file using a script in PHP, Python, or Bash. I'm not in the mood to learn Go, Haskell, Swift, R, Perl, etc.