I’ve recently purchased a copy of Java Concurrency in Practice. I was always a little bit scared of threaded code, but we have a small amount at work, so I figured I’d better get my head around it. Wow. The big takeaway from the book was that I was nowhere near scared [...]
I’ve been buying more books than I should have recently, with the result that a number are piling up behind me. Plus there are a few that I’ve not finished for one reason or another.
Eclipse: Building Commercial Quality Plug-ins, Second Edition. I started reading this and got about ⅓ of the way through [...]
I’ve recently been plowing through a lot of old Asimov books I had lying around. One that stands out in particular is anthology of his robot stories. Imaging what 2005 will be like is so much easier with hindsight!
But one group of stories is particularly enthralling to me: Powell & Donovan. Why? [...]
I’ve now purchased a couple of short cuts from O’Reilly: RJS Templates for Rails and Schematron. At $9.99 a pop, they seem to be pretty good value for money (especially with the current GBP to USD rate). Each one is around 50 pages, which is a concise enough to be a good introduction [...]
I’ve just finished Pro JavaScript Techniques by John Resig (author of jQuery). It lives up to the name. If you’re a beginner with JavaScript, then look elsewhere. But if you’ve done a little bit before, then this is the book for taking you to the next level.
From the very start, it pulls [...]
Last week, a copy of TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac landed on my desk. TextMate has been a part of my life for about a year now. I can’t be doing without it (“Edit in TextMate” is worth the price of entry alone). I consider myself a reasonably advanced user.
Boy, was [...]
A few days ago, somebody at work showed me LibraryThing. It’s the application I’d always wanted to build myself for managing my books. And now somebody’s done it for me. I’ve now chucked all my computer books in and they’re available at: librarything.com/catalog/happygiraffe. By which you can safely conclude that I [...]
It’s Brighton Festival time. On Tuesday, I saw James Lovelock speak about his new book “Revenge of Gaia”. I’m new to the whole gaia thing, but the notion of treating the earth as a holistic system makes a lot of sense to me.
He talked a little bit about Gaia, but much of the [...]
I’ve just gotten a copy of Greasemonkey Hacks and I’m working my way through it. The book itself is great. It’s a really good introduction to greasemonkey and what you can do with it. Eventually, I’m hoping to may my bank usable in firefox.
The only quibble that I have is the code [...]
I’ve recently purchased a beta copy of Rails Recipes. It’s obviously not 100% finished, but appears to be largely complete. It’s already been really, really helpful to me, in particular the chapter on migrations.
But what’s really, really cool is the link at the bottom right of each page in the PDF. It [...]