Sam Danielson

I was writing ListDC in PHP while my shared web host was ranting and raving that they supported the new way to write web software with Ruby on Rails. My PHP code was disgusting so I went looking for alternatives. Using Windows at the time, I downloaded Instant Rails to give it a try.

Ruby on Rails is a sweet framework! Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote a great intro book and Ruby is readable enough that I could figure out what was going on without any prior experience with the language. I won't get all teary eyed and say I love Ruby or anything like that. I will say that Ruby is an excellent tool for the sort of work Rails does and overall I enjoy using the language. It's easy like BASIC yet supports OOP and closures. Methods can become objects with a standard 'call' method and thus passed around like in Javascript, and anonymous methods are supported.

Anyway, I've since switched to the Kubuntu OS because there are so many tools available in Linux. I also dropped my shared host because shared hosting sucks and set up a VPS over at Slicehost. Do you see how I've been affected? Anyone doing web development should get this book.

A real-estate book that isn't full of motivational mumbo-jumbo. There's tonnes of little things in here that I would have never given thought to on my own. I don't plan on 'doing real-estate' anytime soon, if ever, but I did read a few books to see what the fuss was about. Okay, maybe I did want to become a billionaire but that's in the past now. I have since become interested in more interesting things. If I ever feel the need to rent out some property I will pull this book of the shelf and re-read it. Good book!

Are you kidding? I think I'll take the lazy way out on this one. If anyone thinks this is a good book and wants to defend it then please do. I already wasted enough time reading it. It's full of 6th grade math and anecdotal explanation so please leave that stuff alone. There may be some good information buried in there but it's hard for an inexperienced guy like me to pick it out.

A more interesting topic for discussion would be how books like this became so popular. By like this I mean books about how to become rich. I'll never forget a 'job opportunity' (sort of like an interview) I was invited to in high school. A bunch of loudmouths in suits presented a slideshow of folks living the good life, sipping cocktails, driving fast cars, dating hot women, talking on cell phones (it was 1994). It was the basic pyramid scheme and I had to beat the living crap out of my friend to keep him from signing up. There's a sick beauty to it all; poor, desperate guys attempting to look rich in order to hopefully get rich. Like the vacuum in the center of a whirlwind it just keeps sucking round and round, a self-perpetuating lie.

This book is a far cry from anything that empty but I sense the same enthusiasm for 'financial independence', whatever that is.

The mind plays tricks when your awake long enough to cross the Atlantic in a single-engine piston aircraft. This was a really trippy (pun) book. Lindbergh had a knack for writing static descriptions which he used to detail his own thoughts and perceptions. This is definitely good diary style writing for pilots to read. I found it very entertaining. Ghosts in the instrument panel, his near conversation with a housefly, icebergs as clouds or landing strips. . . It's brainbaked.

I think "Getting Started in Electronics" is the best book ever written. There's sweet pictures of transistors getting zapped and resistors sweating because they can't take the heat. I may have it mixed up some because it's been like 15 years since I read this book. It's also exactly 10000000 binary pages long. The new cover is lame. I liked the old green one better. Seriously though, this blogging thing got me thinking of all the influential books I have read and this is one of them.

He has a domain like mine!

I hate flash. I really hate flash. I bought this book because I hate flash but clients love it. I now hate flash less. It's a good book for programmers who wonder what the hell is going on. It stresses modularity in design and includes an example of a full flash, yet still maintainable website. Lynda Weinmann does a good job keeping it real. Consider it a 'best practices' book for flash.

For quite some time I have used classes and objects but only did so for namespace control. They were more or less an annoyance. Everyone says OOP is a good pattern (or paradigm) for modeling problems. We've all seen the diagram of doughnuts floating in a pond where the outer ring represents methods and the inner circle represents data or state. The question of how to best set up my pond and where to put the biggest doughnuts never had a solid answer. I suppose folks with experience using frameworks have seen design patterns in action and already know how to build a good foundation. I had no idea until I got a hold of this book, which incidentally had been on the shelf in the office for like two years. It belonged to my wife but now belongs to me. I actually decided to marry her to own this book for myself. I now see other peoples code in a whole new light.

Dave Thomas is one of the best tech authors I have read (up there with Forrest M. Mims III)! Good tech authors can talk down to you without making you feel like an idiot. This book taught me just enough about ruby to be dangerous. I like how it's divided into two major sections to include a language/stdlib reference in back. It also concisely explains the ruby object system and I had to reread that part like six times. That section of the book is more like a mathematical expression of truth than an explanation but if you seek you will find. Incidentally I can't see a better way of explaining ruby's OOP so I have no criticism for this book. It's one of the few I have read cover to cover.

By Lucas Carlson & Leonard Richardson, this was a sweet second book to have on the language. It seems like there's always these loose ends laying around like I have rdoc but never use it, or I know I should use an aspect pattern here but I've always hard-coded it, how do I write a rake file, etc. This book is full of good idioms and practices but I haven't had time to read it cover to cover. It's sort of like the Bible; 800+ pages, can't read it for more than 15 minutes, learn something good every time I pick it up. I recommend it to anyone who has already read "Programming Ruby" (the Pick Axe) by Dave Thomas.

Intrigued by functional languages I set out with Haskell but like everyone else hit the Monad roadblock. In Haskell you can solve a game tree in three concise lines but actually asking the player for a move requires one to read several graduate level dissertations in CS and learn about set notation and category theory. WTƒ(g)! So being a bit more pragmatic I picked up this Apress book by Joshua B. Smith to learn more about Ocaml. Apress books in general are down and dirty. They seem to be geared toward the amature/enthusiast and they make pretty good entry-level books in that regard. This one pretty much fits that pattern but it's still more than I need to stay busy.