Mandarin Soda » Book Reviews

Lightweight Ruby Web Services

Matt Carlson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:04:43 +0000

The recent Oreilly book Enterprise Rails has a few chapters on SOA and the entire time I was reading those chapters I kept thinking to myself that Rails is sorta overkill for most services implementations, unless you plan on bundling APIs and applications together. I was going to write something about translating the services discussed in that book to Merb micro apps or something similar, but a few recent posts beat me to the punch. Enjoy:

Web Services With Sinatra.

SOA with Merb?.

Throw in a little Happy Mapper and you sort of have the equivalent of Restlet/Jersey and Castor/Jibx in the Java world. Enterprise indeed.

Designing Web Forms

Matt Carlson — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:37:53 +0000

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 really realized how pervasive, disruptive and generally poorly designed most web forms are until I started digging into this book. The sidebar stories in the book are really interesting as well.

Embrace Change

Matt Carlson — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:52:23 +0000

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 Kent Beck’s XP book recently, or ever, I suggest you take a look. It’s probably the best business book I’ve read this year…although I am a bit of a romantic for this sorta thing.

Ruby Performance Best Practices

Matt Carlson — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:15:20 +0000

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 guides such as this. I found it particularly refreshing to see that the title of page 5 is:

Ruby’s Interpreter is Slow.

And that the next few paragraph that follow explain why from an interpreter point of view, which directly relates to the work being done by the JRuby team on the Java JVM, the Rubinius team with their new Ruby VM and Ruby 1.9/YARV.

The Case of the Missing Rails Books

Matt Carlson — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:49:11 +0000

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

Matt Carlson — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:40:03 +0000

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 partially true, it’s almost certainly true that I buy this stuff because I too want to be a pragmatic programmer. Just can’t help it.

Challenge #1: Create Meaningful Content

Matt Carlson — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:56:22 +0000

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 — to a practical and personal piece of medical advice. And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable.

-Malcolm Gladwell