Blog posts tagged: review

★★★★★ (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.

★★★★☆ (4 stars out of 5)

I purchased the Programming Google App Engine book by Dan Sanderson because I wanted to learn more about Google App Engine (GAE) on Python.

GAE is a platform and set of services for building web applications.
GAE scales your web application automatically as long as you work within their set of restrictions such as using a non relational datastore.

Although the online GAE doc has great coverage and documentation, I wanted something which could provide a little more depth. Looking up things as you need them in the GAE docs doesn't give you a high level global understanding of what's possible and how to do it.

I am left feeling confident coding for GAE after reading this book. The author has a great understanding of GAE and does a great job of explaining everything clearly. I was never bored when reading this book and the examples were great dealing with game avatars.

After reading this book you will be ready to take on a GAE project to solidify the knowledge you learnt. You will have a great understanding of GAE runtime, datastore, index design, datastore transactions, memcache, queues, scheduled tasks, webapp module, django on GAE, remote API, bulk data operations, incoming/outgoing email, incoming/outgoing XMPP and more.

You will also understand exactly what will never be possible on this platform (such as writing to the filesystem), and what will one day be possible (such as different languages and runtimes).

This book is a quick read, it is 333 pages not including the index, and if you are only interested in Python you will be skipping over about 1/3 of the book. I would have preferred if the book only focused on Python and didn't even mention Java. I would have preferred the book to be split into 2; a python version and a Java version.

In the one and a half years since the book was released, and since GAE was released April 7, 2008, there are already several additions to GAE, but everything mentioned in the book is still sound. The book will give you enough of a foundation of Google App Engine to continue on.

I hope future editions will include coverage on OAuth, Prospective Search, DoS Protection, the django nonrel project, and updated content throughout

★★★☆☆ (3 stars out of 5)

The book 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know was edited by Kevlin Henney and has no single author. Instead of a typical book with one, two or three authors, this book has almost 1 author per topic covered. The book does re-use some authors across topics, so naturally there are not quite 97 contributors.

Each of the 97 chapters in the book covers one topic, each topic being 2 pages long. The depth of each topic would be equivalent to what you would find on a blog post, or a well written StackOverflow or programmers.stackexchange.com answer.

As expected with dozens of contributors for the book, I had various opinions which can be grouped into:

• I completely agreed with some points
• I completely disagreed with some points
• Other topics I found were acceptable points but really didn't matter as much as the author thought

It was nice to have so many varying contributors and perspectives, all from successful and knowledgeable authors; However, personally I prefer reading from a single author or very small group of authors.

I found it a little annoying that the description of who was giving the advise on each topic wasn't inline with the topic for each chapter.
Instead readers need to flip to the back of the book to read up on each author.

Personally, I like to know about the author when I'm reading any article; it adds more depth and credibility to what is being said. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a page number reference to where the contributor description is exactly.

Strangely enough, I think the best way to read this book may be to start with the contributor list at the end of the book, and read each person's description, and then what they have to say.
The page references to each author's articles are inline with each contributor in the back of the book.

If you haven't read the Joel on Software book series, I'd recommend reading those first. If you have read them and want more, then this book is a great fit.

★★★★★ (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.