Something like a month ago read that this year Standford University Professors behind their AI introduction course are planing to run a free online version with video lectures, quizzes, homeworks and exam. As of today registration to this course is open. I am in. Are you?
Over last months of 2010 I was coming to realization that I want to be able not only to make multimedia Flash apps in web but also build HTML pages and services around them. So decided to start slowly learning some. Also with HTML5 making core web stack more and more potent it would make me more prepared for challenges where HTML5 will be a better choice then Flash for rich internet applications.
Not that I don’t know or did not know some. I have basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL. Kind of standard stack used today for various cases. But here my knowledge is gather from various small cases and web examples. Probably only part of it where I did get some formal education is relational data bases. What I wanted was to broaden my knowledge in all this.
Asking friends for ideas about good books to start from I was often asked “why books?”. Today you can learn anything from the web, thousands of examples, tutorials and documentation sites and active developer communities allow anyone to learn to program anything.
Thing is that I find it to be a bad way to start. Tutorials and examples often concentrate on solving something specific, are not always made with big picture in mind or sometimes even made badly and teach you bad things. I prefer to start from some book that give a broad and not deep view, showing how it is meant to be done without going too deep in to the details(details I will dig out later if I will need). I need this to get some ground under my feet from where I can start. And then explore the web myself knowing for what to look, what’s good and what’s not so good etc etc.
For starters I picked a little bit unusual direction 
As I mentioned I more or less know PHP and I wanted to try something new. Also for some time I was curious about Google App Engine. Pocking around GAE I found that probably best languages for that platform right now are Python and Java. Well I knew Java years back and don’t want to return. So I went in direction of Python.
In last December I was ordering some books from Amazon and ended up ordering 3 books on web technologies.
First book from those I started to read was specifically about Google App Engine. This book covers whole GAE platform as far as I can tell. On programming part it includes both Python and Java specifics, classes and code examples. It helps you trough your first Google App Engine application. Big part of it is Data Store. Then it comes trough various other features of GAE like memory cache, google account integration apis, various other built in apis.
For me most interesting part was Data Store. I am pretty familiar with relational databases and ideas behind them and was always curious what Data Store is, how it works, where better to use it and this books gives pretty good overview on that side. Actually something like 1/3 of this book is about Data Store related stuff.
Some interesting things about App Engine. It was designed with “return answer as fast as possible” ideology for rich web apps. One related to that interesting feature is that app can return result first and then start working on updating data, indexes etc. I guess that possible to do with any stack but I never looked on it from that optimization point.
As far as Data Store goes it reminds me of simple Object Orientated Database. It basically stores entities by unique keys that may have properties and something like classes forced by code. Also Data Store allows building indexes to run queries on some of the property types. As far as I can say there are 3 significant differences from SQL database:
Another thing is that keys are constructed in a way where first part of key is application ID, and you don’t even see it, which means that each app can only get access to entities it has created. Can’t access other apps data directly. Also there are limitations on how many entities you can access at once which along with other GQL limitations makes GAE a bad platform for solutions that for example need t work with large amount of data providing statistical info on it.
I guess that would be it on that book. Overall it gives good overview for GAE providing a good start point if you want to know what GAE can and can not do.
Another topic I was curious about but never was really getting to know it better was CSS.
Basically its something I knew what it was for but did not knew general ideas behind it and how it is really meant to be used. This book claims to be a book for those who have been using CSS for some time but don’t feel they are experts yet. Or people with basic knowledge of CSS. After reading this book I must say that its rather a book for starters. It rather teaches clean and simple CSS/HTML showing where common pitfalls are and all.
This books covers essential parts of CSS, selectors, techniques of layout, advanced CSS3 features and how to do something like that in CSS2.1 using old methods and tricks.
I think best part of this books is that it teaches how it should be done and why. Why HTML part of pages should be designed as meaning and structure while all styling should go in to CSS. Author adds small examples from his experience which make it pretty clear why it should be like that. Or another thing is how using hacking to fix problems is a bad idea as problems are fixed as browsers are updated. So your hacky fix now becomes a bug.
Some 7 years ago coming from Java/C/Pascal background I started to dig in to HTML/CSS/JS and Flash. Flash slowly win me over. It was a way to develop Apps while HTML seemed like way to developer styled text pages along with a bonus of serious cross browser inconsistencies/bugs and limitations. Over these 7 years things seemed to improve especially on JS/CSS front.
Sadly coming from Flash I still find that even CSS3 is insufficient to style things cleanly. Firstly today style is not only about static visuals. Its about animations, reaction to user actions, its about visual behavior of interfaces. Now CSS3 includes animations but that’s not enough. I think big problem is that you can’t reference values in CSS. For example one of examples in the book shows how to make 3 text columns to be of one dynamic height. Thing is that you can have them aether of static height or they all will scale according to size of text inside them. As you can’t reference values in CSS what author proposes is to make all columns of large height, then use container of those columns in “hakcy” way which resizes according its content actual size. Now container is of size of highest column. And now use overflow property to cut out unnecessary height of columns. Of course such trick is possible only with simple column style. Now then all I wanted is to make 3 columns to share same dynamic size. And I end up with doing lot of trickery to get a limited solution. This kind of lets me down…
Another example is vertical content centering on page. Solution looks pretty clear but is limited too. Just make your content top padding 50% which will move its top side to center of page. And then, with different technique, move content up by half of its height. Yay it is centered. Sounds even intuitive and logical in idea. But you can’t target values in CSS. So you can’t target its own height in position style. So you can’t center object vertically if it has dynamic size in HTML/CSS… Or at least it seems so.
Well anyways this all is CSS problems. This books does good work communicating good and correct way of dividing content and style of your HTML/CSS pages. I guess many HTML/CSS problems can be solved with JSS/jQuery filling in position of visual and other behavior for HTML/JS/CSS at least for now.
Another book I only just started to read is this one. I thought that it is a good idea to learn not PHP/Python language directly for web development(as that I can do myself). What I wanted to learn is how to develop good web solutions too. How to architect your engine, authentication, user content, HTML output components etc. I wanted to know best practices in how to develop your engine/framework for web site building. And what’s a better way then learning some framework and seeing how they done things there.
Another thing with Python books is that Python is a language used for broad number of things. While PHP is mostly used for web development Python started elsewhere as general purpose language like C. As a result majority of books don’t cover Python use as web development language almost at all. And thus majority of those books are of no interest for me in current situation. For that reason picking Python based web development framework book seemed like a good idea too.
Now first chapters of this book gives incremental introduction to Python first which is perfect I knew for a while that Python used spaces and new lines as part of its syntax instead of various braces. I always was finding that it is both good and bad. Good that everyone writes in same style as it is enforced trough syntax, also makes language less bloated with special symbols and more readable. Sadly in some cases it also makes language less readable as you can’t arbitrary style some part of code for better readability.
I just only started this book but so far I must say I really like some features of Python. They make language a lot smaller when performing task with array for example. Here are few interesting examples:
Anyways I have still much to read from this one so no more comments on it so far.
Basically this is it from this book order but there are two more I would like to buy. One on JavaScript/jQuery and one on some PHP framework to improve my knowledge in those directions. Also I have few test projects planed to try and use these technologies. After reading book on CSS I already updated homepage a little(here how it looked before), planing to do more work later on it. Also planing to try and do two projects for practice on GAE later.
Today saw this talk at TED.com , it is called “Why work does not happen at work”
Basically it is critics on old and modern way of organization. Thing is that when someone works alone or in group from 2 to 5 they can manage to organize themselves more or less. But as number of people working in collaboration raises costs of managing collaboration raise too. I guess all of us know how it works… We need to start to manage our work, break it to smaller peaces, assign those puzzle parts to different workers, someone then should work bringing parts together and checking everything etc etc.
And we know how for last century various organization coped with it. Though basic ideas probably go far back be it Rome legions or other large collaborations. We humans start to make a hierarchy of management. Like there is Cesar who has legats, who have tribunes prefects etc etc. So we have small group that has manager, then there is manager higher that manages lower level managers etc etc. This kind of hierarchy allows to minimize organizational costs and inefficiencies, but not to remove them completely, and even add new organizational costs and inefficiencies like bureaucracy. continue reading…
Well 4 days ago I took this book from work to read. I picked a little at it during the week and found it and interesting read and only ~260 pages long which means I will be trough with in 1-2 weeks.
Basically it covers stories of how many start-ups started, grew and aether crumbled or set upon a pedestal from which it would be hard to push them . Mostly they are about internet as its a place where viral marketing is at its best but they also cover cases like Tuppleware or Ponzi scheme. But mostly they are about internet starting at story of Hot or Not, telling story of Mosaic/Netscape/IE and a guy who in a way was behind all of them (to my shame I did not know that). Basically those all are stories of internet start-ups that grew exponentially almost out of nothing in such short periods of time that it could seem ridiculous and unreal for people of age before internet.
Well as mentioned above this book is about stories of successful exponential growth that mentions how it was achieved and what are the common pitfalls. Basically it is like a two sided sword that cuts in both directions. From one side you should make an interesting product(cheap and “want”) and give means and motivation for people to spread a word + be cheap and efficient on all the steps + being prepared to scale when exponential growth starts to kick in. Bad product will not be able to even start no meter how much advertisement money you pour in it, making it hard to spread will lower it’s virality and being not prepared for scaling you risk to fall under your own weight. But in internet with right idea today it is easier then ever before. All you need is an idea everyone will understand and want quickly + right tools or platform with viral channels and agile scaling on demand.
So if you are in any way interested in bringing webs attention to something be it some product, idea or tool go and find a way to get your hands on it. It will be worth it at least as a food for thoughts and source of motivation.
