C++ Primer (Fourth Edition) Stanley B. Lippman, Josée Lajorie, and Barbara E. Moo. Addison -Wesley, 2005. Every now and then, someone asks me to recommend a book for learning the C++ programming language. Until very recently, I didn’t have a good answer. The book I learned C++ from went out of print years ago (and… Read More »
I want to preface this article with the comment that I really enjoy reading Joel on Software. I find his essays to be knowledgeable, well-thought-out, and well presented. While I don’t always agree with his conclusions, I always feel that any of his articles is worth a read. So, recently I ran across Joel on… Read More »
For various reasons, I’ve recently been thinking on the importance of programming play, Those times when we tinker with code without any goal other than making something run on the computer. Sometimes this involves playing with a new language or a feature of an old language that we’ve recently discovered. Unlike projects for work, these… Read More »
Eric Meyer on CSS Eric A. Meyer New Riders, 2003 Styling web pages with CSS allows for a very good separation of structure and presentation. In this book, Eric Meyer focuses on the design aspects of using CSS. Many other books describe individual features of CSS and even show how to generate particular effects with… Read More »
In On Proficiency, I talked a bit about what characteristics make up the concept we call proficiency. In trying to hire programmers, a company often tries to measure proficiency to find the best candidate for the job. Over a year ago, I began thinking about how to measure proficiency, and found it to be harder… Read More »
Hardening Linux James Turnbull Apress, 2005. I’ve read several books over the years focused on increasing the security of a Linux system. I think Hardening Linux may be the best example I’ve seen of a practical book on the subject. Turnbull walks through a number of potential security vulnerabilities and gives specific advice on locking… Read More »
In Conversion to Subversion: Tags, I explained how I cleaned up the tags portion of the CVS dump file in order to generate a subversion repository in the format I wanted. Lars Mentrup emailed to say that I had not been clear enough on a few points. After re-reading what I wrote, I have to… Read More »
In order to become proficient at any activity, a person needs four things: aptitude interest knowledge skills To some extent, you should be able to judge a person’s proficiency by measuring each of the four attributes. The first of these is the only one that a person has no control over. If you don’t have… Read More »
Randal Schwartz’s Perls of Wisdom Randal L. Schwartz Apress, 2005 Randal Schwartz has been writing about Perl since the first edition of the Camel Book. This book collects articles that he has written for a number of magazines into one place, organized (loosely) by topic. These articles span almost a decade of writing on the… Read More »
Code Complete Steve McConnell Microsoft Press, 2004 Ever since I learned that a new edition of Code Complete was to be released, I have been looking forward to it. The first edition has been one of the most comprehensive books on the actual practice of writing code. We see a large number of books on… Read More »