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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
People are basically a giant pile of intermittent bugs. With this simple humorous statement, Fitz and Ben 1 perfectly capture the attitude that leads us to need a book like Team Geek (O’Reilly 2012). It’s not the only reason we need a book like this, but it’s an important one, considering our target audience: otherwise […]
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 […]
With Alien Contact, Marty Halpern presents us with an anthology of science fiction short stories predicated on (what else?) first contact with alien species. I was looking for exactly such an anthology, and in my desperation to find such a thing, I decided to start a rumor that John Joseph Adams 1 was going to […]
In Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer presents a series of experimental findings and narratives, and draws them together into an optimistic thesis on creativity and innovation. But there are two books here: there’s the successful book, the book where Lehrer is a capable wordsmith with a knack for describing and synthesizing these scientific findings […]
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 […]