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 […]
In Clojure Programming (Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, and Christophe Grand; O’Reilly, 2012), the preface asks Who is this book for? It’s for a lot of people: experienced JVM developers, curious Rubyists, dissatisfied Pythonistas… Developers of all stripes that are looking to get introduced to, and become proficient in, Clojure. I myself have been circling the […]
Code Simplicity by Max Kanat-Alexander (published by O’Reilly, 2012) is the kind of book you might give to a junior or journeyman programmer and say: “Read this over the weekend, and then on Monday we’ll talk about your design.” There are many quotable passages, pithy aphorisms, and axioms that take the form of definitions, facts, […]
Eric Sarrion’s jQuery UI (published by O’Reilly) is a beginner-to-intermediate level overview of the jQuery UI library and its widgets. 1 Sarrion walks through these widgets one-by-one, chapter-by-chapter, offering a description for each, elaborating on the UI problem that each is designed to solve, and then detailing the API for each of these widgets. Each […]
I just wrapped up reading 1 Theresa Neil’s Mobile Design Pattern Gallery (published by O’Reilly), and I am happy to call it a worthwhile survey. I say “survey” because that’s exactly what we have here: Neil takes a look at the dominant patterns (and anti-patterns) in the application interface designs that are targeted at mobile […]
Ash Maurya describes his book as follows: Running Lean is a handbook for practicing entrepreneurs who want to increase their odds of success. Which, for me, was originally off-putting. Why? When I was reading the blurb, I focused in on the words innovate and iterate and blocked out venture and bootstrapping. I came at this […]
If you are acquainted with China Miéville’s work, there will not be too many surprises for you when you read this novel. Which is not to imply that it is predictable or formulaic, but that it quintessentially one of his novels. It’s all there: the weird landscapes that are intimately, almost erotically detailed; how the […]
Right from the first page, Douglas Rushkoff’s book Program or Be Programmed 1 reminded me of Nicholas Carr‘s, The Shallows 2 — only with a broader scope and more buzzwords and a less gloomy appraisal of the subject. Buy a copy on Amazon (affiliate link).[
]My review is here on this blog. And/or: buy it on […]
There’s a case to be made here that this is Paul Malmont’s take on e-books/new media and the death of literacy (i.e., a dirge and/or lament of the decay of traditional publishing). If I was writing a full on exegesis, my thesis would probably run something like this: We have a principal narrator (Hobart Bosworth) […]
…a review of Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto If you must, you may call it jealousy, but there is no getting around the fact that if someone had read my essays during college, and then paid me to keep writing those essays, then I could (would) have been Chuck […]