Reviews, speculation, and other idle thoughts on hardware, software, firmware…
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’] = […]
Ido Green’s Web Workers: Multithreaded Programs in JavaScript (O’Reilly, 2012) is a dive into the emerging API of Web Workers. It’s a short book–at 46 pages, it may as well be a chapter from another technical book–but it’s free of fluff, and laser focused on one topic, and one topic only. But this is just […]
I thought that I might be the target audience for this book, but I was mistaken. In the preface of Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod (O’Reilly, 2012), author Michael Snoyman describes this book as “for” two groups: The first group is long time Haskell users–already convinced of the advantages of Haskell–who are looking […]
Recently, while working my way through a strange issue with my shell’s $PATH, 1 I had the chance to take a (semi) deep dive into how OS X constructs the $PATH. I’m jotting these notes down here in part for myself, and hopefully so someone else won’t have to do the same amount of… archaeology. […]
If you’re new to the world of REST APIs, and if you’re looking for a good set of working rules on how to design them, then Mark Massé’s REST API Design Rulebook (O’Reilly, 2012) should live up to its title just fine. It’s a short book (you could read it in an afternoon) and it […]
I’m home and ruminating in the hang-over basking in the afterglow of the first all-of-engineering hackathon where I work. I wanted to do some reflection and get some notes down while it was all still fresh in my mind, before the exhaustion fully sets in and I crash right here on the couch. I started […]
About nine months ago, Hans Petter Eikemo announced his Chrome/Safari extension called Footnotify which is like a “lightbox” for “Daring Fireball style” footnote links. I loved it immediately but found that it did not work for the footnotes on this blog you’re reading here. To be pedantic: they worked on the landing page, but not […]
Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas (O’Reilly 2012) is a short-and-sweet little text on (as the cover says) “writing readable code”. And by “readable code”, Zakas means “code that other developers not named [YOUR NAME] will be able to read and comprehend of and ultimately maintain”. It goes beyond maintainable and readable code though–Zakas takes us […]
I pushed version 0.7 of Orin (this blog’s theme) on April 11th, and considering what happened between then and now… Well, I meant to make an announcement and I guess it just needed to wait about a month. At any rate: version 0.7 of Orin refactors the blog as a “mobile first” responsive design. It […]