Archive for the 'Book Reviews' category

Designing Web Forms

If you do anything web design or development related or just have some free time on your hands and feel like contributing to an interesting independent publisher, I highly recommend checking out Luke Wroblewski’s book on web form design. While somewhere in my subconscious I’ve definitely been annoyed by filling out forms, I hadn’t [...]

Embrace Change

XP is about social change. It is about letting go of habits and patterns that were adaptive in the past, but now get in the way of us doing our best work. It is about giving up the defenses that protect us but interfere with our productivity. - Kent Beck
If you haven’t read [...]

Ruby Performance Best Practices

The Addison Wesley Professional Ruby Series just released a new shortcut on the somewhat contentious subject of Ruby performance entilted Writing Efficient Ruby Code written by the highly regarded Rails performance expert Dr. Stefan Kaes. So far (page 10), I’m impressed by the content. Most languages need (and some have) general best practices [...]

The Case of the Missing Rails Books

Dear Oreilly,
As an avid book buyer, I’m writing to inquire as to the whereabouts of Programming Rails and Rails in A Nutshell.
I wonder what the Jruby folks would say?. (Or maybe I don’t have to wonder?)
Guess this gives me more time to finish my Erlang book.
Thanks.

Challenge #2: Brand Affiliation

It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever write a lick of Erlang code (or finish the book for that matter). Nor is it at all likely that I’ll ever be in a position to use the ANTLR parser generator. I like to think I buy this stuff because I’m intellectually curious. While that’s perhaps [...]

Challenge #1: Create Meaningful Content

The students needed to know how to fit the tetanus stuff into their lives; the addition of the map and times when the shots were available shifted the booklet from an abstract lesson in medical risk — a lesson no different from the countless other academic lessons they had received over their academic career — [...]