Check-in

Not a technical post, but a personal update. I promised over a week ago.

I’ve been exceptionally busy at work, we’re beginning to finish up a much needed, much discussed by librarians, redesign of PubMed. We’ve put a ton of user interaction effort into this project, as well as a good sprinkling of graphic design (watch out, I even did some parts!) I think people will be really positive about these new changes.

[Just for the record, if someone happens to stumble upon this from the librarian community, yes, release date is still end of summer, and yes, there will be a Beta period, so no need to worry about a short timeline to update your class or instructional slides. We do listen!]

It’s also been exciting that we’ve brought a few new people on board. Always exciting to have new hires, despite the fact that it’s a lot of work… and all of the trainings I have to do.

What else… I’m planning on attending the DelveUI masterclasses this week in Brooklyn. It will be interesting to see what some of the heads of state have to say about the field. I’m a little excited, this masterclass format isn’t the usual boring no-content fluff that you hear at most conferences. I get the feeling that there will actually be code present! My thanks to the lovely Jina “Sushi & Robots” Bolton for the opportunity for the free ticket.

I’ve been reading… way too many things. I’ve been reading Learning jQuery 1.3, jQuery UI 1.6, and jQuery in Action and you’ll see the reviews of those two books very soon. (Can you tell that we’ve switched to jQuery at NCBI?) I’m a little behind with that reading, but I’ve been working hard on other things. Additionally, I went on an Amazon spree, and started reading Programming the Semantic Web, An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists, To Mock a Mockingbird, 101 Things I learned in Architecture School, Code Complete 2. Last but not least, I’ve also been reading any photography book that I can get my hands on.

Yes, that is a lot of books, and I haven’t had much time for them. I’ve been working hard at work, and I want to relax a bit when I come home. Once summer ends, things will return to a slightly more regular pace. I’ve been learning so much on the job, that I’m not very worried about falling behind in reading.

Review of "Prototype-Based Programming"

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.

Review of "Expert Python Programming"

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.

Review of "Object-Oriented JavaScript"

I recently read Object-Oriented JavaScript, by Stoyan Stefanov. In reviewing it, I found it was one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while, for some good reasons and a few more curious reasons.

Object-Oriented JavaScript was authored by Mr. Stefanov, who is a developer at Yahoo. It features an impressive number of reviewers (twelve), among them Douglas Crockford, the author of JavaScript: The Good Parts, and Ross Harmes, author of JavaScript Design Patterns, both of whom are Stefanov’s Yahoo co-workers. In a reasonable 330 pages, it features eight chapters on JavaScript’s History, Basic Syntax/Features, Functions, Objects, Prototypes, Inheritance, the DOM, and Patterns/Best Practices.

Readers with little to no JavaScript knowledge will be able to read this book, but I’m uncertain how much they’ll be able to glean from the meaty inner chapters (functions, objects, prototypes, and inheritance). Readers with moderate JavaScript understanding should be able to learn a great deal from this book. At the very least, advanced readers should be reminded of some of the language’s quirkier parts, as well as benefiting from an organized chapter on inheritance techniques.

It is tricky placing Object-Oriented JavaScript in context of the corpus of JavaScript literature. This book includes more than a little introductory material (chapters 1-2), while the core chapters (3-6) are way beyond an introduction. Only after those chapters (which I will discuss in a second) is the reader introduced briefly to the DOM and XHR before a chapter on design patterns and best practices. At a minimum, every chapter is useful and full of hints that are difficult to grep from run-of-the-mill JavaScript books. The book steers clear of the murky world of browser differences unless they’re pertinent to the topic of Object-Oriented JavaScript, which seems perfectly acceptable.

Back to those middle chapters, they are sheer gold. I am going force myself to make time to re-read this book, if not those chapters alone. They present, in a clear and organized fashion, many difficult aspects of the language, including closures, prototype, and 12 different methods for inheritance. In comparison, I believe Harmes’ book isn’t as well organized, and Crockford’s book isn’t as clear. Stefanov doesn’t break much new ground here, but the clarity describing these techniques is quite valuable regardless.

Object-Oriented JavaScript appears occasionally try to be something to everyone. This is kind of disappointing, since I would have loved to have seen any additional discussion or insight the author could have offered in the core chapters. There are tons of introductory JavaScript books, so I don’t know what a book titled Object-Oriented JavaScript gains by including more introduction. This shouldn’t detract from the book’s overall value. All of the chapters are well written and useful. However as a reader gains a better understanding of JavaScript, the introductory chapters will become far less useful, while the other chapters will remain an excellent reference.

Review of "Web Form Design, Filling in the Blanks"

“Forms suck. If you don’t believe me, try to find people who like filling them in.”;

Are you kidding, I paid for a book that begins like that? My first reaction was that I could have written that! Well I didn’t write it, and I also feel that I got my money’s worth out of Web Form Design, Filling in the Blanks, by Luke Wroblewski.

Forms are hard. I don’t think I need to mention how hard they can be for users… nor do I need to mention what’s at stake if a user finds your form too difficult. Every web developer who doesn’t have his/her head in the clouds should know that. Forms, however, are also very difficult to create… correctly! A well designed form requires a lot of careful, detailed thought. You have so much to consider… usability issues, accessibility issues, and you usually don’t have anything to go on except for your personal experience. This book will help you methodically approach form design, and give you the experience of an expert to guide your decisions.

Web Form Design is useful, because Mr. Wroblewski takes a very detailed approach to each aspect of form design. Within each chapter, he thoroughly analyzes the major elements to consider when designing a form. For example, the chapter on “Actions”; is devoted to action items such as submit and cancel buttons. One of the sub-sections discusses where to place these items on the page. The author first presents the reader with the following image demonstrating all of the reasonable placements for the submit and cancel actions.

Using eye-tracking and usability data, he then discusses the pros and cons of each arrangement, without ever deciding one is better then all others. This is key because it lets the reader, knowledge in hand, decide his/her own course of action.

The book is especially valuable because of the user data, eye-tracking data, and case studies presented within. Mr. Wroblewski’s backs his reasoning with either a summary of these tests or with an example culled from his experiences. He reinforces his points with a number of demonstration images, all available from the book’s flickr page. Then he includes a short “best practices”; section to close each chapter, outlining what was discussed. These can be used almost as checklists. Interspersed in the text are sidebars which present real-life examples and perspectives from numerous field authorities.