Just looking at it, I can tell exactly what I can expect when I click it.
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To me, that URL tells a delightful children’s story…
FlashSubContent = a wonderful fantasy world [elephant] id = 11654 [Dumbo] [elephant] parentID = 320 [Mrs. Jumbo] [cage] FolderID = 340 [because they took her Dumbo away, and Mrs. Jumbo got angry, so she had to get locked up] aspx = evil clown makeup wearing Microsoft employees who locked Dumbo’s mother up
I ran across a mention of “Prototype-Based Programming” back when I was first learning JavaScript. I thought it would be an interesting read, but forgot to bookmark it, and forgot to look into it further. Once I finally remembered it, it proved hard to find (and an expensive gamble from Amazon), until I found it through NIH’s interlibrary loan system.
I was quite excited to get my hands on a copy of this book, I was interested in learning more about the general theory that went into languages with prototypal inheritance. I thought this would allow me a special insight into JavaScript. However, as I found reading it… despite it’s 1999 publication date, JavaScript wasn’t even mentioned in the book! Regardless, I found parts of it to be quite interesting and insightful.
The book is broken up into three sections (as mentioned on the cover), Concepts, Languages, and Applications. Each section has 4 associated chapters which are really various papers, some of which seem to be difficult to find elsewhere.
The first section, “Concepts” was the most interesting. The first was titled “Classes vs. Prototypes: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations.” This chapter provided a nice introduction to the topic, including the history of classification, going back to Aristotle and proceeding to Ludwig Wittgenstein who had an interesting example about classifying the characteristics of an item as simple as a “game”. It goes on to transition to a programming perspective. A point that is made repeatedly throughout many chapters that the idea of classical inheritance necessitating construction from the top (superclasses) to the bottom (subclasses) is inherently contradictory to the way humans think. When unfamiliar with a domain, a person can more easily deal with concrete examples, and only discern the abstract general form after discovering these patterns in the concrete cases. Though unable to put my finger on this idea, I’ve experienced it a number of times when programming myself, and couldn’t agree more.
The next chapter, “Classifying Prototype-based Programming Languages” sought to categorize the theoritical aspects of different prototypal languages. This is the chapter where I most missed the reference to JavaScript, but I may look into doing that myself some other day. “The Stripetalk Papers: Understandability as a Language Design Issue in Object-Oriented Programming Systems”, made an argument that prototype based systems could be used to enhance the learnability of languages. Finally, the chapter “Classes versus Prototypes in Object-Oriented Languages” looked at the advantages and disadvantages of class-based and prototype-based languages. This chapter was quite interesting, however brief.
Based on the title, Expert Python Programming, (by Tarek Ziadé) I had expected a book covering the Python language… syntax, advanced data structures, maybe some functional programming… stuff like that. This book surprised me. Rather, it contains a hodgepodge of information about the world of Python development, from setting up editors to distributed version control to application distribution. “Expert Python Programming” does contain some information on the Python language itself, but not as much as I would have hoped. While it does contain a good amount of useful information, overall, I’d have to say that it misses the target.
Quickly summarized, the book contains 3 chapters on package management and distribution, 2 on syntax, 2 on optimization, and one each on language setup, naming conventions (style guide), version control, project management, documentation, test-driven development, and design patterns. Based on the content, I might have titled this book “Expert Python Development Practices”, and think I would have been happier reading it in that case. The discrepancy between the title and the content is especially bothersome to me, since it would be easy to assume this book focused specifically on programming, rather than code management.
Expert Python Programming’s greatest asset is the number of tools and utilities that it covers. As a mostly casual Python programmer, there were a number of things that I learned, especially with regard to package management and distribution. I’ve never needed to build a package, and never used Atomisator or zc.buildout before, so I found these chapters rather interesting (though not personally useful at the moment). To be sure, when I need to use these, this book will the be the first place I come.
I was familiar with a decent amount of the information in the documentation, test-driven development, and style-guide chapters from reading some of the Python Documentation and a few of the PEPs (Python Enahncement Proposals). These chapters would be good for anyone who doesn’t want to have to go and search for this information on their own, and I think it would be rather handy to have all of this information in one place.
The weakest part of the book were the chapters focusing on Python itself. The majority wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking here that I haven’t read elsewhere, while the interesting sections, such as “How Python Deals with Memory” and “Multithreading” were short and not particularly detailed. The sections on optimization were nice, but limited.
My orchestra is playing Sibelius 1 tomorrow in Columbia, Maryland. It’s not my favorite symphony, seems a little naive, though he wrote it when he was 35. If you wanna check it out, first check out the site.
I love reading programming books, especially to learn a new programming language. Learning XSLT, I read a large number of books, as there are quite a few available. The quality of the XSLT books struck me as particularly all over the place, some were quite good while others weren’t even worth the time to skim. So I’m throwing together a simple list of my current collection of XSLT references, which happened to be my favorites of the bunch. These books are all geared towards specific audiences… beginners, advanced, etc, so I included their audiences.
XSLT – Mastering XML Transformations, Doug Tidwell This is my favorite XSLT book. Mr. Tidwell did a great job of combining an introduction to the language, a tutorial on how to write XSLTs, and a reference all into one book. On top of that, I found it to be written in the clearest, most conversational style I’ve found in many a programming book. I find this book covers 90% of my day-to-day needs, and when I forget how something works, this book usually answers my questions. (Plus, hey, you can get the 1.0 version for about $3 used.)
XSLT: Programmer’s Reference, Michael Kay If Mr. Tidwell’s book covers 90%, this book covers all 100%, and then some. Mr. Kay (who wrote the Saxon processor, if you weren’t aware) presents what amounts to an annotated specification in book form. One of my co-workers calls this book the XSLT dictionary, and I can’t argue with that. This book is probably best for advanced programmers.
XSLT and XPATH on the Edge, Jeni Tennison Once you’ve got the basics of the language down, you’ve got to use it to write real-world code. I found this book helps to smooth down the rough edges of working with the language. This book requires a mid-level familiarity with the language.
XSLT Cookbook, Second Edition, Salvatore Mangano I reach for this book whenever I’ve got to do something weird. I use it to find the solution to some odd edge case, or for my “can I do this with XSLT” questions. The book covers everything from faking regular expressions, to set operations on different node-sets, to functional programming with XSLT. I don’t use it often, but it’s like gold when I do. This book is mostly for advanced users.
XPath and XPointer, John E. Simpson The content in this book is totally covered in each of the other books, and it isn’t really XSLT, because it only covers XPath. But this book is my simple reference to 90% of the XPath questions I have. It is a nice little book that I could live without, but it certainly makes my life easier having it around. I think new users will likely get the most out of this book. (Another book that can be had for about $3 used.)
(For disclosure, I did make the links amazon referrals. I feel kinda weird, but figured why not. I don’t expect any results, but if I got some, it’d go straight to buying a new book.)
