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 »
Software Exorcism Bill Blunden Apress, 2003 I was really looking forward to this book, having spent a fair number of years maintaining legacy code in different languages and environments. This made the disappointment even more acute when the book did not live up to its subtitle: A Handbook for Debugging and Optimizing Legacy Code. The… Read More »
In the first article of this series, Conversion to Subversion, Part I, I described the problem I found in trying to convert a project from my CVS repository to Subversion. In my last article, Conversion to Subversion: The Project’s Trunk, I described the solution that I used to convert a basic project with no tags… Read More »
In Conversion to Subversion, Part I, I described the problems I found when I began converting my CVS repository to Subversion. In this article, I describe the work and surprises that came from the first project migration. My first idea was to build the repository from the dump file and then fix the result using… Read More »