Blog posts tagged: oreilly

★★★★★ (5 stars out of 5)

The book Node for Front-End Developers by Garann Means presents a great introduction to Node and its surrounding modules.

Not only is using the same language for both client-side and server-side awesome, but Node itself is fast, stable and production ready. Node was first created by Ryan Dahl and is built using Google's V8 JavaScript Engine.

The book is nicely organized and lightly touches everything you'd want to have when starting with a new web framework. If you haven't done a ton of web development, you'll get lots of introductory bits on things to learn such as the key-value store Redis.

The following topics (and more) are covered:

• Setting up Node and Node Package Manager (NPM)
• Testing with command line
• Serving static content
• Serving dynamic content
• URL routing
• Handling HTTP POST data
• Handling AJAX requests w/ JSON and JSONP
• Using node.js with HTML5 websockets (very cool!)
• Server side templates, passing server side data to templates
• Partial templates
• Working with persistent storage
• Working with files
• MVC pattern

You won't go deep into any one topic; however, the book gives you just enough information to know where to go from there. I'd recommend this book to anyone with some JavaScript experience that wants to know what Node is all about.

★★★★★ (5 stars out of 5)

When I previously thought about CSS I would only think about:

1. selectors, or selector hierarchies, and
2. properties related to those selectors

Although both are covered in detail in this book, the book really helped me discover things I had no idea I didn't know about CSS. The book does a great job of not explaining fundamentals of CSS and focuses instead on what's new in CSS3.

Media queries in particular was great to know about for making your website capable on mobile devices.
After reading its chapter I immediately implemented media queries on my blog.

I really liked how this book was organized, the first part deals with the CSS3 features that are already implemented in major browsers, followed by the parts which are partially implemented, and finally the things which are not yet implemented or agreed upon and are likely to change.
Every chapter ends with each major browser and the support it has for the features discussed in the chapter.

Other features like opacity, RGBA & HSL & HSLA colors, drop shadows, rounded corners, and much more were great to know about.

Several tips are provided for working with older browsers in a sane manner throughout the book for just about each section.

My only criticism in this book is that it would have been ideal to know not what is expected in IE9 but what is actually in IE9. IE9 was released March 14th,2011 this book was released in April, 2011. I can understand though that this would have delayed the release of the book.

Update: The author Peter Gasston has up-to-date information on the website which supports the book.

★★★★★ (5 stars out of 5)

As a kid I remember feeling uninspired because there were genius' out there, and I wasn't one of them.

How can I ever amount to anything when competing with such people?

Although there are people with amazing mental abilities, most of the people I now consider a genius have no special mental ability, just determination and hard work which enabled their breakthroughs.

I wanted to read this book because I spend a significant amount of time learning and doing work, and I figured this book would inspire me to stay along the same path. This book did indeed do what I wanted it to do, but the book covered a lot more as well.

We tend to attribute innovation to a moment's insight or a lucky accident, but the true story behind innovation is much more exciting than the false stories we believe. There is no magic element which allowed past innovations to happen, simply hard work. Hard work which is based upon, and combined with existing hard work. Everyone that does hard work makes mistakes, encounters obstacles, and has failures. The people who succeed are the people that embrace these mistakes and take the opportunity to learn from them.

This book inspires the reader to not only passively consume information and knowledge, but to be a creator instead.

This book also covers many other topics surrounding ideas and innovations including reasons why ideas fail and succeed. An idea needs to be able to fit its surrounding environment for it to succeed, and as an innovator we need to frame the correct problems to solve before trying to solve them.

The author (Scott Berkun) does an excellent job of not blindly giving his opinion, but backing up his claims with sources and situations throughout history. You can see the book The Myths of Innovation here.

★★★★★ (5 stars out of 5)

If like me, the last time you read about HTML you read that XHTML was the future, and you are wondering what happened since then, this book is for you.

Mark Pilgrim does a great job of showing you:

1. The direction that web standards are going
2. How web browsers and hence web standards have evolved to get to where they are today
3. Introduction to the main new HTML5 elements and DOM APIs
4. How HTML5 is already thriving, and how you can use it today. (Including the Javascript library Modernizr for detecting HTML5 features)

If you work on websites, web apps, have a blog, have a company website, or are just curious about how HTML is evolving, HTML5: Up and Running published by O'Reilly is for you.

Before reading this book I always had the feeling of: “how can I improve my blog and company website”. Now I have a long TODO list of things I know I can do to improve them.

HTML5 was designed around already existing browser features. The latest versions of Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE9, and Opera all support most HTML5 features, and do it consistently according to what the standard says. Default browsers on iPhone, iPads, and Android phones also support most HTML5 features already, and also do it well. Many parts of HTML5 can be used with fallback methods if HTML5 support does not exist already for older browsers.

This book contains very enjoyable coverage on new HTML5 elements, new DOM APIs, and some other related web technologies. Some topics covered include: canvas, video, local storage, web workers, offline web applications, geolocation API, microformats, and adding semantics to your web pages. The book is a quick read and leaves you feeling that you have learnt something which will help you in the future.

I would have liked to see coverage on Drag-and-drop and also when to use SVG over the new canvas element and canvas APIs.

This book is derived from Dive into HTML5 which is by the author.