** UnhandledExceptionEventHandler :: OFFICIAL LC / CHATTER THREAD **

[jalexand42]

Here's a thread for random crap.

If this forum becomes permanent, we can decide if we wanna recycle this thread periodically.

Welcome!

[Gullanian]

Hi!

00000001st

[CPFB]

10th

[MNOWAX]

just wanted to say hi. I am mainly a hardware guy, I don't do much programming, but would love to learn more. Sounds like I'll be lurking a lot around here!

[Benholio]

Heyo. Would anyone be interested in starting a book review/recommendation thread? There are so many programming books out there, it would be nice to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Things that would be nice to know about some of the popular books:

-Basic review (5/5 stars!)
-Prerequisite knowledge / difficulty level
-What is the goal of the book? (ie: Teach some design patterns, etc)
-Any particular chapters/items that helped you the most

I would start the thread myself if I had a good review. I do have a couple of books queued up to read sometime soon that I'd particularly enjoy feedback on:

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices (recommended by Gaming Mouse)

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

[jalexand42]

Originally Posted by Benholio

Heyo. Would anyone be interested in starting a book review/recommendation thread? There are so many programming books out there, it would be nice to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Things that would be nice to know about some of the popular books:

-Basic review (5/5 stars!)
-Prerequisite knowledge / difficulty level
-What is the goal of the book? (ie: Teach some design patterns, etc)
-Any particular chapters/items that helped you the most

I would start the thread myself if I had a good review. I do have a couple of books queued up to read sometime soon that I'd particularly enjoy feedback on:

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices (recommended by Gaming Mouse)

Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

I'm definitely okay with trying this, and I expect that if someone read a fantastic book for Ruby for example, they could post a review in the Ruby discussion thread.

If anyone has some books they love, feel free to start a thread about them.

[jukofyork]

Originally Posted by Benholio

Heyo. Would anyone be interested in starting a book review/recommendation thread?

Yeah, I think that would be a pretty good idea!

Juk

[notthatphil]

Not a book but a service. Books24x7 If your company doesn't offer it, get them to offer it. Its what O'Reilly's Safari is trying to be but it has more publishers.

For books
Learn Objective-C for Java Developers
by James Bucanek
Apress © 2009 (519 pages) Citation
ISBN:9781430223696

Great book to learn objective-c if you know java.
4 out 5 five stars (not a great reference after you've read what you need).

[jukofyork]

Originally Posted by Benholio

Heyo. Would anyone be interested in starting a book review/recommendation thread?

Perhaps the same could be done for podcasts too? There seems to be an almost infinite amount of them; varying vastly in quality and content.

Juk

[goofyballer]

Programming TR:

I just wrote my first Python script a couple days ago. I had a memory dump of a text file in the debugger (it was a debug log that hadn't been flushed to disk) and I wanted to convert it from hex to readable text.

Results: it was really easy! Python is kool.

[jukofyork]

Originally Posted by goofyballer

Programming TR:

I just wrote my first Python script a couple days ago. I had a memory dump of a text file in the debugger (it was a debug log that hadn't been flushed to disk) and I wanted to convert it from hex to readable text.

Results: it was really easy! Python is kool.

The "indentation scope" thing always seemed a bit weird to me: people argue that since you already indent things as part of standard programming practices it doesn't matter, but if you add more scope around some already heavily indented code you have no curly brackets or begin/end statements to "remind" you what the original scope looked like (probably negated by using a decent IDE though).

Juk

[kerowo]

Moving python scripts between vi and text wrangler tends to screw up the white space and causes errors, which gets annoying, but I was able to parse XML in a python script by using google so that's pretty cool. Now I just need to learn enough to make it look a little less preschool.

[swrittenb]

Originally Posted by goofyballer

Results: it was really easy! Python is kool.

Yay, Python! I got started in Python about five or six years ago, and it just keeps getting more and more powerful. For simple tasks, you can really save a lot of time with a good general scripting language.

[wellju]

We should be glad that Bill Gates was wrong with "640K ought to be enough for anybody".

Otherwise beautiful languages like Python and Ruby wouldn't exist and we would be busy typing 1000 lines in C instead of a single "optparse".

[tesuji]

Originally Posted by jukofyork

The "indentation scope" thing always seemed a bit weird to me: people argue that since you already indent things as part of standard programming practices it doesn't matter, but if you add more scope around some already heavily indented code you have no curly brackets or begin/end statements to "remind" you what the original scope looked like (probably negated by using a decent IDE though).

Juk

Or your editing someone else's code and realise they've used spaces instead of tabs (or vice versa). I like the way Haskell indentation works.