Just like it says on the tin, Functional JavaScript (Michael Fogus 1; O’Reilly, 2013) is just that: a book about writing JavaScript in a functional style with Underscore.js as the foundational library to give you some of the higher-order functions you need to get started. 2 First, a disclosure: I have a very personal relationship […]
Despite the fact that there’s no real reason to be apologetic, I also haven’t yet reached the point in my career as a software developer where I’ve stopped apologizing for the fact that I have no “real” Computer Science Background. 1 And/but that’s exactly what draws me to books like Understanding Computation by Tom Stuart […]
If you’ve been programming in Grails for a year (give or take) and are ready to go deeper than the tutorials and docs usually take you, then Burt Beckwith’s book — Programming Grails (O’Reilly, 2013) — is going to feel like just what the doctor ordered. If asked to sum it up as a pithy […]
Evan Hahn did us a favor and slapped together this primer for us: JavaScript Testing with Jasmine: JavaScript Behavior-Driven Development (O’Reilly, 2013). It’s short (around 50 pages), so you can burn through it in an afternoon, but he hits the high notes and (most importantly) provides a clear path for how to get started using […]
Doom Days is an anthology in the same spirit as Larry Niven’s The Man-Kzin Wars series or Robert Lynn Asprin’s Thieves’ World 1 — a “shared world” anthology conceived by one author, but the individual (and loosely-connected) stories written by several others besides. This particular set of stories is set in a post-apocalyptic United States […]
tl;dr: It’s a 150 page essay on auto-boxing, full of dangerous code examples and anti-patterns and soft warnings to “not do what I just did”, and some of the wording is not-wrong-but-not-quite-right, but hey there are some decent parts, I guess. Cody Lindley’s JavaScript Enlightenment (O’Reilly, 2012) has an awesome title, and I wanted very […]
An (apocryphal?) tale: 1 when Brendan Eich unveiled the original JavaScript (nee LiveScript, nee Mocha) prototype at (then) Netscape, it was a Lisp. 2 It was only at management’s insistence that the language received a C-like syntax, and even then it was mostly to have some kind of syntactic parity with Java (with which it […]
Right off the bat, and just so we’re clear about this: I read an “Early Release” edition of Mark Ethan Trostler’s Testable JavaScript, and in a lot of places… it shows. I’m sure it will come through editing and be a lot tighter by the time you read it. 1 Putting its rough “Early Release” […]
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 […]
Wes McKinney’s Python for Data Analysis (O’Reilly, 2012) is a tour pandas and NumPy (mostly pandas) for folks looking to crunch “big-ish” data with Python. The target audience is not Pythonistas, but rather scientists, educators, statisticians, financial analysts, and the rest of the “non-programmer” cohort that is finding more and more these days that it […]