I had an interesting thought during an email conversation with a friend yesterday. One problem many people have when using XML for data is a misunderstanding of what the XML is. (If you don’t believe in the data in XML approach, feel free to ignore me.<grin/>) It’s easy to make the mistake of treating the… Read More »
Java Cookbook Ian F. Darwin O’Reilly, 2001 In spite of the fact that it is supposedly written in the style of the Perl Cookbook, this book was a real disappointment. The cookbook format is intended for showing solutions to common problems. However, the author of this book appeared to be trying to force a tutorial… Read More »
In my weblog entry from a couple of days ago More Thoughts About Debugging, I forgot to add the information that prompted me to write in the first place. I was looking around a few weeks ago and found a series of links providing various pieces of debugging and troubleshooting information.
Although the debate continues to rage between the XML as documents camp and the XML as data camp, it seems reasonable to believe that both styles are here to stay. I have noticed one trend in XML data that strikes me as déjà vu all over again. There seem to be a large number of… Read More »
Although it’s not a book and not directly related to programming, I am going to review one of the best reading tools I’ve ever seen, Book Darts. If you read or deal with a lot of reference books, you need to look at these little wonders.
SVG Essentials J. David Eisenberg O’Reilly, 2002 A little over a year ago I bought and read SVG Essentials by J. David Eisenberg. At the time, I was moving from dabbling in SVG to beginning a contract which required the use of SVG. This book provides a good working overview of SVG. I have seen… Read More »
Earlier in this weblog, I listed some of my basic troubleshooting rules. I thought it was probably time to come back and spend a little more time on this topic. I plan to expand on the points I made earlier and add a few more thoughts along the way.
In most of the SVG I’ve seen people either prefer to use the style attribute or set the individual style attributes. I don’t see much use of CSS classes and I wonder why. Most of the criticisms I’ve seen of the use of CSS fall into four categories: It’s not XML. It’s too verbose to… Read More »
I’ve been thinking more on the issue of Magic Constants. Have you ever noticed that when some people first understand the idea of symbolic constants, they want to collect all of the constants they’ve defined together in one spot?
A truly bad code example in a book on Java Servlets got me thinking about the idea of Magic Constants. Of course, we are all aware of the problem of magic numbers or magic literals in code. That’s why we use symbolic constants instead to hide that implementation detail (and to simplify maintenance later). However,… Read More »