Here's a thread for random crap.

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

Welcome!

Hi!

00000001st

10th

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!

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.

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

Juk

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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".

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.

The best programming book I ever read is Code Complete 2. Reading and absorbing even a little of what's in there is enough to start you down the path to being a real-life good programmer

I am doing some cheap side work on a website for a small business a friend of mine runs and it's the worst. code. ever. There are literally 9 copies of every single goddamn page. Copy. Paste. Make 14 changes. change name from x_foo_bar.php to y_foo_bar.php

I should be charging more for putting up with this.

</rant>

Just refactor it. Create include files with the template, and then every time you touch a file, switch it over to the new version. Life is good again

it would take a lot longer than I want to spend to refactor this and I has a schedule and I'm not doing it for free, friends or not. I did try to sell them the idea of a refactor though. ah well

i'm getting paid by the hour anyway. So I told them the overhead the bad code causes and as long as that's what they want to do for now c'est la vie. I just get to be annoyed for a few more hours today

I dont know anything at all about programming but it has always been something i'm interested in...does anyone think it would be a good idea to have something in the FAQ about what kind of resources to look at for a complete noob to possibly learn the basics of programming without taking a class..there has to be some websites one would think

Not sure if this forum is meant to just be geared towards people who aren't complete beginners or not

This would be extremely nice. I really want to learn how to program and would love some more info.

I found this page with a list of resources for learning Python if you haven't programmed before; the first link, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, is an online book that teaches the basics of programming using Python. Maybe try that out?

Python is probably a good language for beginners because it doesn't take long to get set up with (you don't need to compile code into an executable, you just run it) and is lax with things like declaring variables and types that might annoy or intimidate the beginning programmer.

Where you go from there depends on what you hope to accomplish with programming. If you dive into that and have questions, I'm sure a "Beginner questions" thread would be fine if you want to start one, there are plenty of people who can help answer whatever questions you have.

I'll second this. I think python is a really good language to learn programming with. Most of the syntax is natural and there is a ton of documentation. It is a dynamic language with strong typing, which allows a lot of flexibility without being too reckless.

Also, once you get the hang of some basic python there is a lot you can do. Building web apps and/or desktop apps is no problem. You can also do OO programming or functional programming with python, whatever floats your boat.

Surely there's better garbage collection available than just recycling the whole thread.

Guys,

What are some good resources for salaries? I feel like I'm paid way under market. Indeed.com seems to give me some pretty high numbers, but I don't know. (2.5 years of exp, programming 99% in c++, in LA area...)

http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=soft...+Angeles%2C+CA