by Joey deVilla on November 12, 2009
My friend (and former officemate!) Cory Doctorow is launching his latest novel, Makers, tonight at the Toronto Public Library at 239 College Street (east of Spadina). The fun happens in the Merrill Collection room, located on the third floor at 7 p.m. tonight. Cory will be doing a reading, taking questions and signing books. There will be books for sale at the event courtesy of our local science fiction and fantasy bookstore, Bakka Phoenix.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb about the book:
From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America
Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.
Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.
Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.
Then things get really interesting.
It should be noted that while 3-D printers of the sort in Cory’s novel are still the stuff of science fiction, simpler versions exist today. In fact, at the Hacklab, where I spend many a working day, we’ve got a MakerBot Industries “Cupcake” 3-D printer that can “print” plastic objects.
Here’s what the Cupcake looks like:
A computer connected to the Cupcake controls it. The big loop of plastic to the upper left of the machine is the material from which objects are printed. Here’s a closer look at its internals:
We have a small gallery of objects that were created using the Cupcake:
If you’d like one of your own, the fine folks at Makerbot Industries would be more than happy to sell you a kit.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Tagged as:
3-D printing,
Cory Doctorow,
HacklabTO,
MakerBot
by Joey deVilla on November 11, 2009
The Empire’s been fine-tuning ASP.NET, SQL Server and the .NET runtime from the get-go, so ASP.NET is a pretty snappy platform. Even so, the fastest of platforms will still run like molasses in January if you don’t do things right. With any platform, there’s a body of best practices for getting the best performances, and with far too many platforms, these best practices haven’t been gathered into a single place.
ASP.NET developer are in luck: I just got notified by Apress of the release of a new book, Ultra-Fast ASP.NET. Here’s the blurb:
Ultra-fast ASP.NET by Rick Kiessig presents a practical approach to building fast and scalable web sites using ASP.NET and SQL Server. In addition to a wealth of tips, tricks and secrets, you’ll find advice and code examples for all tiers of your application. By applying the ultra-fast approach to your projects, you’ll squeeze every last ounce of performance out of your code and infrastructure, giving your site unrivaled speed.
Learn How To:
- Think about performance issues that will help you obtain real results.
- Apply key principles that will help you build ultra-fast and ultra-scalable web sites.
- Use the ultra-fast approach to be fast in multiple dimensions. You’ll have not only fast pages but also fast changes, fast fixes, fast deployments and more.
- Use techniques that are being used by some of the world’s largest web sites.
- Structure your HTML and CSS to create pages that load ultra-fast.
- Utilize tips and tricks for optimizing your ASP.NET and SQL Server code for performance and scalability.
You can order the dead-tree edition of Ultra-Fast ASP.NET online (it sells for USD$49.99, which at today’s exchange rate is CAD$52.32), or if you’re like me and try to get the electronic version when possible, the PDF version sells for USD$34.99 (CAD$36.62 at the time of this writing).
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
by Joey deVilla on August 17, 2009
“This book is about finding fulfillment and happiness in your career” is the first line of the introduction to The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler’s book for software developers. If that goal wasn’t bold enough, the first line of the following paragraph is “The book is also about cultivating the desire to live a remarkable life.”
The Passionate Programmer is actually the second edition of a book that went by another title: My Job Went to India: 52 Ways to Save Your Job. When that book was released back in 2005, the threat of having one’s job outsourced to lower-wage countries was the topic of many articles and conversations. My Job Went to India provided a collection of strategies to take control of one’s high-tech career, build a plan to keep skills up to date, make the right choices, stay relevant and not be the expendable sort whose job would be outsourced.
The bogeyman may have changed from outsourcing to the economy, but the concerns that developers have about their careers remain the same. Chad saw the need for a new edition of his book, and with the new version came a new tone. He gave it a more positive-sounding (and less alarmist) name and changed its focus from surviving to thriving.
The Passionate Programmer is split into five chapters, each covering a different aspect of a developer’s career:
- Choosing Your Market: “Which technologies should we invest in? Which domain should we develop expertise in? Should we go broad or deep with our knowledge?”
- Investing in Your Product: In this case, your product is yourself. How do you become better at what you do?
- Executing: Tactics and habits for getting things done.
- Marketing: Not Just for Suits: As the title implies, marketing skills aren’t just for the business people – developers need to market themselves.
- Maintaining Your Edge: How stay relevant and not be a one-hit wonder.
The chapters are themselves divided into sections, each one covering a specific approach or bit of advice. This arrangement lets you treat the book as if it were an agile project, picking and choosing a section at a time to read and put into practice instead of doing “big reading up front” from start to finish. It also makes the book easier to revisit when the need arises.
In the end, the message of the book is to find and follow your passion, and do so with intention. In the final section of the book, appropriately titled Have Fun, Chad closes with:
Ultimately, the most important thing I’ve learned over the journey that my career in software development has been is that it’s not what you do for a living or what you have that’s important. It’s how you choose to accept these things. It’s internal. Satisfaction, like our career choices, is something that should be sought after and decided upon with intention.
The Passionate Programmer is an engaging, fascinating book, and it will have a longer shelf life than most of the technical books in your library. I know many people who own a copy and have recommended it to their friends, and the Amazon and Dr. Dobbs reviews have been nothing short of glowing. No matter what platforms, programming languages or technologies you use, The Passionate Programmer should be in your technical library.
Book Details
The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
- Publisher: Pragmatic Programmers
- Published: May 2009
- ISBN: 978-1-93435-634-0
The book is available directly from the publisher in the following formats:
- Paperback book: USD$23.95
- Ebook (DRM-free PDF, epub and mobi formats): USD$15.00
- Paperback/ebook bundle: USD$29.95
You can also order the book from Chapters/Indigo, Amazon.ca and Amazon.com.
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Tagged as:
Chad Fowler,
Passionate Programmer
by Joey deVilla on July 3, 2009
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Manning Publications have a great variety of books on .NET development. There’s the stuff you’d expect, such as books on C#, ASP.NET and SharePoint, but they’ve also produced books on IronPython and IronRuby (not many books on these languages), functional programming is both F# and C# and doing brownfield development and building DSLs using .NET. Many of their books have helped me get up to speed with .NET development, and I’m currently working my way through The Art of Unit Testing.
Another great thing about Manning Books is that they’re available in both paper and electronic form. This is great news for me, as I have disk space aplenty, but I’m running short on shelf space. There’s also the fact that while technology-specific books are useful, their shelf life is rather short. I’ll still buy paper editions of books that are longer on theory and technique, but when it comes to specific versions of languages, libraries or frameworks, I’ll take the ebook version.
One more great thing about Manning Books is that they’re generous with the discount codes. Their discount codes are often for 33% to 50% off the regular price, and they announce them on their Twitter account, @ManningBooks. If you’re looking to build your tech library and save money at the same time, you should follow them.
(Just so you know: Neither I nor anyone at the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft have any kind of arrangement to promote Manning’s books. I just like their books, and getting a discounts on them is a bonus.)
Tagged as:
discount codes,
Manning Publications
by Joey deVilla on June 15, 2009
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
As a rule, Chapter One of most programming books seems to leave me with a vague, unsatisfied feeling. I usually finish them with either:
- A “Hello World”-style application that provides an initial “It compiled!” rush, but little else, or
- A “Trees dies for this?” sort of indignation, if the chapter is one of those perfunctory one with a name like “Getting Started” that provides the same information you gathered while deciding whether to buy the book.
Based on these experiences, I think I can be excused for being a bit skeptical when I read the announcement that Chapter One of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0, published by Wrox, was being made available for free download. Of course they’re giving it away for free, I thought, it’s the chapter that’s worth nothing!
A quick aside: If you haven’t heard of ASP.NET MVC, it’s Microsoft’s answer to the MVC-based frameworks that are all the rage these days, such as Ruby on Rails and Django. It’s not a replacement for ASP.NET, but an alternative; if you want to build applications following the REST paradigm, with fine-grained control over the flow of your application and HTML and want to do things “the web way” as opposed to a more “desktop app” way, you should seriously consider trying it out. (For more detailed pros-and-cons considerations of ASP.NET versus ASP.NET MVC, see this article in Nick Berardi’s Code Journal.)
Luckily, curiosity got the better of me and I downloaded the chapter. I got my first sign that wasn’t your garden-variety Chapter One when I looked at the file size and page count. 14 megabytes? 196 pages? Something strange was going on here. Perhaps a glitch during the download?
Once I scrolled past the cover page, the standard Wrox cover featuring the authors and their impressively receding hairlines (hence the nickname for the book, “The Gang of Foreheads”), I hit the introductory paragraph:
The best way to learn a new framework is to build something with it. This first chapter walks through how to build a small, but complete, application using ASP.NET MVC, and introduces some of the core concepts behind it.
That’s right: rather than provide some long-winded perfunctory history of the Model-View-Controller framework, the backstory of how the ASP.NET MVC framework came to be or some simple “Hello World”-style example app of little consequence and requiring less effort, the authors decided to get right down to business and show you how to build an ASP.NET MVC web app. This was a surprise – but a very welcome one!
The application that you build is called “NerdDinner”, a site that lets techies declare Meetup.com-style gatherings and RSVP for them (you can see the finished product in action at NerdDinner.com). You start at ground zero, “File –> New…”, and from there, you build the app with just enough asides to explain a few vital concepts and very few of those false detours that some tutorials lead you down. NerdDinner may be a simple app, but it covers a lot of ground:
- From the basics of CRUD application design in an MVC web framework
- to matters of input validation,
- to registering, authenticating and authorizing users
- to integrating Ajax-enabled forms and an Ajax map
- to the built-in unit testing features of ASP.NET MVC.
By the end of the chapter, you’ve got a nice little application that lies in the “sweet spot”. It’s small enough for you to be able to learn from quickly, yet big enough to show you the ropes behind building the important parts of a CRUD web application that’s ready for public consumption.
I’ve tried out a number of ASP.NET MVC tutorials, and this one’s my hands-down favourite. It’s written by the people behind ASP.NET MVC, it covers a lot of ground, the finished app is an excellent basis for your future projects, there’s a working version online that you can use as a guide and the code works! Even better, this single chapter that packs all this value is free-as-in-beer. I’m sure I’ve paid for whole books that have imparted less knowledge than this single free chapter.
If you’re interested in learning about ASP.NET MVC, download Chapter 1 of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 [13.8 MB PDF] and give it a try. It’s the fastest way to get both a working ASP.NET application and up to speed on Microsoft’s new web application framework. And be sure to tell me how it worked out — if you have any questions or comments, or run into any difficulty with the chapter, let me know – drop me a line via email, send me a tweet or give me a shout-out in the comments.
Tagged as:
ASP.NET MVC,
Gang of Foreheads,
NerdDinner,
reviews
