Shell scripts, JavaScript pedantry, CSS fixations, Java debugging, and the rest of the polyglotism.
I was drawn to Wesley Hales’ HTML5 and JavaScript Web Apps (O’Reilly, 2012) because it seemed right up my alley — a book about all the latest client-side technologies 1 for building enterprise grade “HTML5-based” web apps. At around 150 pages, Hales takes us on a whirlwind tour of these new technologies and tactics, taking […]
I picked up a copy of Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman’s Head First HTML & CSS (O’Reilly, 2012) as schwag at a conference I attended 1; judging this book by its cover, I was pretty clearly not the audience for this book but hey: when have I turned down a book? So who is the […]
Katie Cunningham’s The Accessibility Handbook (O’Reilly, 2012) is a concise and specific introduction to accessibility (a11y) and 508-compliance. Cunningham provides a “walking tour” of the major types of disabilities that web developers need to consider when creating a site for a11y, illustrating how people with those disabilities will use a site, and then detailing easy […]
This past weekend at Vermont Code Camp, I caught Mike Fowler’s presentation, “Crafting Scalable Stylesheets”. In that presentation, he discusses this notion of “smart” variables (slides 32 through 35), wherein we provide an argument to a mixin (or even just a simple @if statement), and then based on that argument’s type-of value, we select a […]
Yesterday, I gave a talk (slides are here, and/or rate my talk here) at the fourth Vermont Code Camp on how to run fast, reliable, headless unit tests for JavaScript using the Jasmine BDD test framework and PhantomJS. What follows here is a summary of “the meat” of the talk: specifically, how to execute your […]
Well this one is coming up fast… I’ll be speaking at VT Code Camp 2012 this Saturday (September 22nd) at 1:30pm. The title of the talk is “Like a Genie from the Lamp: Headless JavaScript BDD with Jasmine and PhantomJS” and here’s the abstract: Jasmine is a mature BDD test framework for JavaScript, and though […]
Goodreads.com has a community guideline that states that reviews must be about the book, and not about the author. Now, I happen to agree with the spirit of this guideline, but I also feel like that guideline gets a little fuzzy when you’re looking at non-fiction, and especially fuzzy when you’re talking about technical books. […]
Today, while exploring Larry Myers’ jasmine-reporters extensions for Jasmine, I encountered something that I’d never seen before: (Source.) Did you see it, too? I saw it because my editor didn’t highlight it as an operator like I was expecting it to. What is this |=? I wondered. I scratched my head. Is that right? Is […]
Although I run the risk of fawning all over this book here, Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan’s Regular Expressions Cookbook (Second Edition) (O’Reilly, 2012) is a technical text that I will gladly describe using words like “essential” and “indispensable” and “invaluable”. It should be on every working programmer’s bookshelf, if not on her desk. It […]
Inspired by @fat’s @angustweets’ 1 “If Hemingway wrote JavaScript”: if Mark Z. Danielewski (author of House of Leaves) wrote JavaScript: // The narrator leaks globals but we cannot know if he intends this; we are // forced to trust him. There is no going back. stairs = this[‘stairs’] || {}; stairs[‘0’] = null, stairs[‘1’] = […]