I've been reading... ...even though it's been sooo long I blogged about the books I read.

Recently, it became easier to read, actually listen.
I now have an audible subscription, www.audible.com, its great.

In the last month, I've listened to the following titles:

• Animal farm by George Orwell, my very best


• Beauty and the Beast by Andrew Lang


• Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson


• The Creation Story from the Bible Experience, truly great experience


• The True History of Little Golden-hood also by Andrew Lang


• What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis

I need more of these goodies.  ¶ 11:40 AM 0 comments

  HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using Css Author: Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer

I grew up as a developer who got used to what a fellow developer at artemis (www.artemis-solutions.com) once described as "Table Kung-fu". Table kung-fu became our word for layouts using tables. Only Stan (the web) seems to "get it".

I have slowly migrated to layouts with divs and css ever since but mostly by little articles that pointed out a little at a time or by asking "lots of questions" from colleagues and google. I understood a lot of css now (now being before this book) but like every informal education, there are a lot of loopholes where you apply your own custom "Holly hacks".
This book formalized my education.

I can proudly say that I fully understand 3 column layouts now, plus I got a lot of interesting pointers to interesting sites like http://www.alistapart.com among others. Quite an interesting read.

After going through the book, you get a good reference for named colors and css attributes at the appendices.

Highlights:

• Inheritance and the cascade in cascading style sheet
• Expression measurement
• Accessibility
• 2 column and 3 column layouts using positional syntax and floats
• Browser compatibility issues

After this, you can safely depart from the era of table Kung-fu. And if you are thinking this education may be coming too late as we've entered into the new era of web 2.o and all the interesting developments around flex, silverlight to mention a few, experience tells me nothing is wasted.

  ¶ 10:32 PM 0 comments

  Build your own Ruby On Rails Web Application I have been reading and not blogging as much. Topics as diverse and divergent as Biz talk, Linq, Ruby on Rails, Lisp and Lua programming has kept life interesting; all very interesting stuff. Well, sitepoint did send a free pdf of the Ruby On Rails (RoR) book, Building Your own Ruby on Rails web application and that was really cool.
The link is here if you want your own pdf. The book's review enjoyed a fair amount of criticism especially from people who have been doing a lot of RoR but great reviews from people just getting into RoR and who are not very experienced in setting up web servers and the likes, geeks vs geek-in-make reviews!
I think the book is great and you can tell where I belong in the RoR world. a crash course in Ruby and an introduction to Rails using a sample application built chapter by chapter, an approach I see as a great learning methodology. The book even went to lenghts to talk about testing, debugging and deployment. It includes sources of Rails environment, test and deployment scenarios on Linux, Mac and Windows.
My best book so far this last quarter of 2007.  ¶ 2:36 AM 0 comments

  Exception Management in .Net A small piece from MS patterns and practices. The book needs a little updating; it says stuff like "derive custom exceptions from ApplicationException". I know MS says derive from System.Exception now.

MS Press, a free download from the patters site. Interesting until it started talking about logging with Enterprise Infrastructure Framework. Yes, it got boring at that point because I don't have it installed. Completed the book the following day after falling asleep though its a little over 30 pages. Referred me to other resources a bit too much but its still a good book if you are really bothered about how to handle exceptions correctly. Free books don't hurt when u can derive at least some useful info.  ¶ 3:31 PM 0 comments

  User Interface Design for Programmers Written by the don Joel Spolsky, a man whose judgements I have come to respect a lot.
Apress Books (2001).
The most refreshing book I have read since Head First design patterns. The stories are short and sweet in the traditional Joel way. His judgements are largely unbiased. He explored the beauty of using tab controls correctly, probably a guiding force for Office 2007's new tabbed approach its common user interface. He critized those mundane windows wizards that asked questions I called my brother to answer then. Why ask a user to minimize database size or pick another option, I just want to search dude!
I particularly agree with designing some user interface the common office user interface way; arguably over 90% users of Windows are already familiar with the same UI and will expect to find an exit menu under File. And true, Microsoft spends a lot on usability tsting, by the way Joel should know as he wwas former program manager for Excel.
I have listed a couple of usability changes I would like included in ourEMR application.

1. Most recently accessed patients because users don't remember


2. Less intimidating dialog boxes because users can't read


3. some more interesting and suggestive icons, to serve as real world metaphors


4. Change the save key from ctrl + C (this is a nasty one) to ctrl + S. This ensures users are in charge and have more control. Its also the general windows way, what were they thinking of when they asked for that key combination. Oh its embarasing I implemented that!

A lot more stuff on web design, he canvassed those good old suggestive 3D push buttons, links with normal behaviour and some truly interesting stories.

Did Joel truly work in that bakery?, the things people do for survival.  ¶ 3:02 PM 0 comments

  Designing Data Tier Components and Passing Data through Tiers MS Press: Collaborators: Luca Bolognese, Mike Pizzo, Keith Short, Martin Petersen-Frey (PSS), Pablo De Grande, Bernard Chen (Sapient), Dimitris Georgakopoulos (Sapient),
Kenny Jones, Chris Brooks, Lance Hendrix, Chris Schoon, and Franco Ceruti (VBNext).

This is one of the great books that caused me to make a routine of visiting the Microsoft patterns and practices website .A straight 70 pages, appendix, introduction and all inclusive. I had to put a copy on the community site too.
Before reading the book, I design data tier somewhat close to the ideas in the book, but I had a lot of questions in my mind regarding certain decisions. why can't I just pass a dataset here instead of an Arraylist? How about XSD schemas or just plain XML for business entities, it seems to make sense here. Ok, what about the CRUD methods, should I add them to my business entities or keep this strictly to my data access logic? What if I have a custom ORM?
The book mentions the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Buchao! MS Press.  ¶ 3:02 PM 0 comments

  A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript by Simon Willison Simon willison

This is my best javascript book, its interesting its only 20 pages. The title may be as misleading as the name javascript itself - it does not require a knowledge of prior javascript. He has a brief intro how it was supposed to be Livescript and ended up being javascript.
For real, its thorough. Well, it helps if you have programming skills in java or c/c++ or c#. It hits straight below the belt and does well in 20 minutes what others do in 3 or more days.
This book solved my mysteries of everything being an object in dynamic languages, something that has been elusive before now: functions are objects, Arrays and prototyping.
Beauty summarized. Thanks Willison.  ¶ 4:47 PM 0 comments

  Intro Ok, so I smade this blog to comment on the books I read in the wee and not so wee houra. I guess this is going to be a very active blog since I hve about a 100 books waiting to be read.
Stan is helping to keep the heat going. Stan is my colleague in the office and I'm a developer. so 80% of the guys in my office are software developers too. Fortunately I don't read about technology all the time so in addition to technlogy, expect to see a lot of stuff here.  ¶ 3:49 PM 0 comments