technical

Dear Data

Book Notes

"Here," he said. "I think you'll enjoy this. It seems right up your alley."

I keep track of all sorts of things. I absolutely love what numbers and visualizations can tell us about ourselves and the world around us. So, when Kris handed me this book, I have to say I was immediately delighted, and immediately oblivious to EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD as I read it. One of the very very few non-fiction books that I've devoured in a day. I love this book. I absolutely adore this book.

The book is a series of weekly postcards sent between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, visually detailing some data they decided to collect for the week. They put the data into a visualization on a postcard and mailed the postcard to the other. There are so many of the postcards that I just loved ("OOOOOOOOOO, I should track that, too!").

I had an idea of doing this review in numbers (289 pages of the 308 page book actually numbered, something something something), but really, my description cannot do this book justice. So, really now, ignore me and go watch their videos or buy the book.

The book is cute, whimsical, and COMPLETELY MOTIVATING. I love it.

Recommended.

Recommended. Recommended.




Principles of Object Oriented JavaScript

Book Notes

As part of my belief that one should never stop learning, I keep trying to learn. This month's learning involved reading this book, Principles of Object Oriented JavaScript, a relatively short book by Nicholas Zakas.

I'm comfortable in JavaScript, but, really, haven't ever taken the time to read about some of the insides of the language. I'm glad I picked up this book.

This book is a quick read, about 132 pages of content and 25-ish of index, depending on the format you read the book and the font size you select. The book covers primitive types, reference types, built-in types, function declarations vs function expressions, objects in general, property attributes, object constructors, object prototypes, property attributes, inheritance and various object patterns. The code examples are clear, the writing voice conversational.

I had a couple "Ohhhhhhhhh!" moments, which were fun, with a lot of head-nodding-yep-I-knew-that moments, too.

I liked the book. Recommended.

Present

Book Notes

I received an advanced reading copy of this book. I am unable to publish review until the book is published, but suffice it to say, you want to buy this book if you are interested in starting to speak in public.

My review will be quite favorable.

Preorder here at http://femgineer.com/present-book/, which leads to https://publishizer.com/present/

 

 

 

 

 

Minitest Cookbook

Book Notes

Okay, so, for the record with this review, The Minitest Cookbook was not the book I needed, nor expected. Take the rest of this review with a grain of salt as a result of that disclaimer.

I've been writing code that is tested with minitest tests for nearly a year now. I find that my understanding of when to use mocks versus stubs versus expects versus pick something else, to be somewhat lacking. Sure, I can cut and paste another test and modify as I need to modify it to fit my particular test case, but I don't want to copy and modify a test. I want to understand the reasoning behind what I'm doing and create a test, to understand "this is what I'm testing and this is how I go about it." Being able to do that quickly requires that I understand the system that I'm working on as a whole perhaps better than I do, but being able to do it without a full understanding is needed at this point.

So, I picked up this book as the recommended minitest book. Lots of favorable reviews, this is the book you want if you're learning minitest.

Except, it isn't.

It's too complicated for beginners (are n00b or newbies still derogatory terms, or have they been embraced by beginners - I guess if beginners are okay with being called dummies, they're okay with being n00bs), and not well organized for an intermediate user. I'd consider myself halfway between those two designations, so figured I'd get it, but, eh, didn't really work out that way.

Agile Web Development in Rails 4

Book Notes

Okay, I read this one again, since the first reading was before I knew what things were and why I was doing things and oh, god, what have I gotten myself into? Helps to have development under your belt for these things.

This book was recommended to me as the book to learn Rails development. It has two main sections: a hands-on let's-build-a-rails-app section, and a here-are-the-explanations section. The first is designed to guide you through building an application with Rails, the second to explain what the hell just happened and how all the parts fit together. The book builds a slight e-commerce platform: a store's product display / catalog, administration section, shopping cart, checkout and user authentication. The example is great, I definitely liked that it wasn't a blog or a twitter client.

The book is good and it works. It is not the book for new developers, however. It uses a lot of words and concepts without explaining them, assuming the reader knows what they mean. And this is okay. The book is for a developer who is learning Rails. It does that well.

Time-wise, if you're going to read the book and do the exercises (say, a new employer is giving you a chance to come up to speed with Rails, or the first couple weeks of work to learn), give yourself 2 work weeks to go through it. You can do it faster (you can always do things faster), but doing the exercises and typing things in and playing around with things relevant-to but not part-of the lessons is what makes learning better. So, yeah, play around, poke around, learn something outside the lesson for greater good.

Pragmatic Guide to Sass

Book Notes


Pragmatic Guide to Sass, by Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin
128 pages
Published: 2011-12-16
ISBN: 978-1-93435-684-5

When I was first becoming a professional programmer, I worked with a consultant who, despite being newer to the language and IDE I was using, was able to teach me some new syntax and features. When I asked how he knew these things, he pulled out an intermediate book on the language and commented, "You find a lot of new tricks reading the manual cover to cover."

In that vein, I picked up the Pragmatic Bookshelf's Pragmatic Guide to Sass by Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin. It is a relatively short read at 126 pages, made shorter by the function reference that starts at page 107, and the Haml introduction at page 114

The book is a fast read, made up of tasks and Sass solutions. The basics of the concepts are introduced: variables, imports, mixin, extend, math operators, @each and @if, along with a number of conventions that would surprise anyone who didn't know about them. I'm thinking of the underscore-prefixed file name convention for Sass files that are not standalone after compiling (partial imports) with that comment.

The book is a couple years out of date, and could be updated to include new Sass and Compass features such as namespacing and possibly defining custome sass functions.

As a introduction book, which this book describes itself as, it works. As a refresher book, which this book describes itself as, it works less well. It skims over some of the whys one would use a feature, in favor of how one uses a feature, and doesn't contrast features much. As an introduction, this could be okay for most designers or developers. I prefer the whys, even if only in a sidebar.