Recruiting thread was the worst AINEC

no way there was a sick burn in that thread that made it all worthwhile

Also I don't want to hate on books in general. There's some books in my techbook collection that I'd always buy no matter what. "The C Programming Language" is the best tech book I have ever read and "TCP/IP Illustrated" belongs on every bookshelve if you ever think you'll be in contact with networking of any sort.
Then there's stuff like "Code Complete" which I like to reread every now and then.

I enjoy reading real books a lot more than reading stuff online because I won't be tempted to distract myself if I sit down with a book.

For library and language references I generally prefer online stuff, for short recipes I also prefer online stuff. I do own a bunch of books that are fairly dated and of questionabl use these days

The definitive couchdb book doesn't cost money. They are charging on the o'reily site but the author of couchdb released it for free. Buying it is kind of like donating to them. That's why I asked for similar JS books, I have no intentions in buying a book.

Reading the documentation is never a bad idea but usually I only use it when I'm looking for something specific. When I did most of my work in PHP I found those docs to be useful; search for a function, see a quick example and optionally browse community solutions, not too shabby.

On the other hand, learning JS (to create server side code w/ node) probably can't be learned in a similar fashion. I know a lot of the functions already but most of my JS work up until now has been hacking around with the DOM and Googling for specific things when I get stuck (not really learning). I figured a book that wasn't tied in too close to the DOM would have been a good idea to read because this seems a lot more like theory than just parroting random example code.

What other high quality online resources do you use besides the docs and SO?

Buying books is never a bad idea though. Spend 30$/month on a book and read it and you'll have expanded your horizon quite a bit in one year for a mere 360$. Beats every university out there by a good margin imo.

You can set off the book costs against tax liability, at least where I live.
My ex-employer got us all 400$ amazon gift coupons for books at christmas we obviously spent for video games and 2 books to show off at the desk.

"One book a month" is one of the best habits in life one could have imo.

Maybe that reading books stuff is a Euro thing and I surf the internet too little

I also don't see anything wrong with donating to someone who helped your career tremendously.

Maybe it's these 10$ donations that keep people on publishing their content for free without getting greedy, but still have the feeling that their work has some value.

I donate to projects all the time because I know what it's like to work on an open source project and get some help on it. Feels awesome.

quick q

i have a basic site for my app with a download link, feature list, measly documentation. i plan on taking it commercial soon. first, i want to put up some support forums. i was planning on just using some basic forum software such as phpbb.

however i just found out about www.OSQA.net which is basically a stackoverflow clone. i really like this type of community, but i'm just not sure which would be more appropriate for a support forum type thing. a typical "topic/reply" forum thread system, or a "question/answer" type thing. they are similar but have a distinctly different feel

any thoughts?

It depends on how frequently someone from the community would be the one to post the "right answer". What makes SO thrive is that people are motivated by reputation to post good answers in hopes to get up votes and check marks. If your product is something that a community would be able to do that, it might be a good idea. But there needs to be an install base for the community to exist and be productive.

In contrast, if the forum is going to be more people showing up reporting problems and then other people saying "that happened to me to", that's not really answering the question. That is more of a discussion about an issue. And for a while, until other people become very familiar with the product, you will be the one showing up with the authoritative answers. That lends itself better to a forum.

4 openings at my company with a $10k referral bonus. I wish I had smarter friends...

Make a trip to Delhi.
Spend 20k on booze to find some smart friends.
Pocket the other 20k.

You do have smart friends, we are just on the internet.

And we charge 50%

If they involve massively parallel and/or scientific computing I'm looking.

Don't worry, I already know they don't.

if you work for an MLB team and they need someone to do neural net analysis maybe 20 hours a week and it's located < 2 miles from my home then i am your guy

otherwise eh

It's java in Boulder, but I wish I worked for the M's and could bring you in kyleb.

You might get your wish. (shh)

Programming Forum is sloooow on the weekends everyone must me actually working and posting during the working week

quick question for you guys, i have a new laptop and am installing eclipse on it. things seem to have a changed a bit since the 3.5 version i have on my current comp. currently, i recall dloading eclipse just once, and then installing some plugins for stuff like php editing. but the new downloads page seems to have entirely different versions for the different languages:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

so will i need to do one install for java, one for php, one for anything else?

yah because this thing called the internet doesn't exist.

Please get me an (I'll take unpayed) internship in sports management if you ever get this gig. It's pretty high on my "interesting jobs" list (would also settle for NFL, NBA, NFL, college, MLS or any european soccer league ldo)

I think what he means is that books tend to be structured and you'll often find information you wouldn't have concidered googling for in them.

I assume I've mentioned this in other threads, but I might as well drop the link again:

http://www.springloops.com/v2/

I use this for version control/deployment. Completely free while it's in beta testing. Absolutely love it. Supports git/SVN at the moment, deploy to three environments (automatically on commit or manual deployments), ticketing system, RSS feed for commits, user system, etc.

Kyle, this looks cool, but I can't find any documentation on the site about how to use it.....

Welcome to the Web 2.0. And foreign companies. Also free software.

But yeah. Documentation sucks. What do you want to know?

Like, how would I use it? I assume it's some kind of replacement for my normal cycle of svn comitting, then doing svn update on staging and live servers. So, what is your workflow like with it? How do you move an existing svn repository there?