I purchased about 6 books last year. The sale has some great price reductions and the SitePoint books are very good. I particularly like their HTML Reference book. Books come in both dead-tree and magnetically aligned particle formats. Pay attention to the version that is on sale before you buy.
SitePoint Holiday Sale
I’m trying to learn Django and started with the definitive source. The intro includes a brief history of Django, which I found fascinating.
"The World Online team, responsible for the production and maintenance of several local news sites, thrived in a development environment dictated by journalism deadlines. For the sites — including LJWorld.com, Lawrence.com, and KUsports.com — journalists (and management) demanded that features be added and entire applications be built on an intensely fast schedule, often with only days’ or hours’ notice.
Funny list of coding terminology.
I really like the term “Mandelbug” for some reason.
I was recently wasting some time playing with an idea. I wanted an easy and quick way to grab some text in any arbitrary application and pop over to MultiMarkdown Composer to do some editing. I also wanted a way to pop the text back into the original app when I was done.
You might be yelling at the screen right now telling me to just use the cmd-tab to switch back and paste the text.
Perceptive Automation, the makers of fine mac-friendly home automation devices has announced Python support for Indigo. I think I just found a new winter time hobby.
By way of The Loop
The flow-diagram from today’s Rand In Repose would also have made a great shirt. I traverse this diagram almost daily.
I really like Dr. Drang’s method of using sips for manipulating images. I set out to modify my FTP macro to include an image resize step. After a short bit of playing around I discovered that it’s very easy to manipulate images right in AppleScript. In fact, Apple provides services to add the necessary code to a script just by selecting the variable that points to an image.
Here’s the script:
CoffeeScript looks nice. I really like the thoughtful debate that is happening around the concept. It’s a healthy way for languages to evolve.
Writing better JavaScript with CoffeScript
CoffeeScript means giving up on JavaScript
Response to CoffeeScript means giving up on JavaScript
All by way of Zite
I'm not sure how long this has been available, but Pragmatic Books now offers automatic syncing to Dropbox. That means my Dropbox account will always have the latest version of my Pragmatic books.
I really like the Pragmatic model. They offer print on demand copies of their works as well as early access electronic versions. The books are very high quality and always well written. I only wish that the videos I've purchased could also be synchronized with Dropbox for offline viewing and streaming to my AppleTV.
Ridiculous Fish has blog that is very good reading for beginners. It might well be good reading for more advanced Cocoa programmers but I’m not one to say since I am a beginner.
Make sure to start at the beginning of the posts and work towards the more recent articles.
