Tech Books I Read In 2006
I read the following books in 2006. I’m writing this post to guilt myself into writing a review for each.
- CSS: The Missing Manual (ISBN 0596526873)blog post
- Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition (ISBN: 0974514055)
- Head First Design Patterns (ISBN: 0596007124)
blog post - Rails Recipes (ISBN: 0977616606)
I’ll do a post for each book (eventually) but here are some brief notes.
CSS: The Missing Manual (ISBN 0596526873)
My notes and review of the book are now in this blog post
| I only read the first two or three chapters of the CSS Missing Manual. Although not a HTML book it does have a nice opening chapter about writing well structured HTML. If you use the TABLE tag to format the layout of your page then you need to read this book because you are writing obsolete HTML. Valid and well structured HTML has higher SEO qualities and is easier to maintain. |
Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition (ISBN: 0974514055)
| I’m going to have to reread this book again as well as read the “The Ruby Way”. Although I provide Amazon links you should buy this book from the Pragmatic site as you can purchase a PDF copy at the same time. The PDF copy is really useful to have handy on your laptop or desktop. There are many things to take away from the book but the easiest is how to use Strings in the Ruby way. Most every language uses quotes to delimit string literals. But in Ruby quoted strings are evaluated for additional embedded Ruby code as well as escape characters. If you don’t know what you are doing that can leave a wide open door for a performance hit on your application. Instead use single quotes for strings unless you need to embed additional code. I see this mistake more often than not in both examples and “production” code. |
Head First Design Patterns (ISBN: 0596007124)
My notes and review of the book are now in this blog post
| I’m about 2/3 of the way through this book. Its been very useful to tune-up my OO skills. I’ll summarize my notes from reading the book in a follow-on post. Right now I’m paid to write Java but I think when I re-read the PickAxe book I’ll be able see how to implement the classic design patterns in Ruby on my own. |
Rails Recipes (ISBN: 0977616606)
| I bought this book for myself for Christmas :) I haven’t read every page of it yet but I will. Already I’ve put the RESTful recipe and email processing recipes to use. More to come. This is also a Pragmatic book, its also best to buy it with a PDF copy from their site. |
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