I found a library I want to use for a project. I only need about 60% of its code and will make a few small changes to the source. It's MIT licensed with this notice,

Do I just put the license in comments in the same file as the lib or something? At what point is what I have sufficiently forked that I don't need this? I realize MIT is basically the "do whatever you want" license but feel compelled to look into this kind of stuff since I may be selling this project later on and want everything done right.

I actually interviewed to work with that guy. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far, but I was honored.

I have the first edition of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1784390291

I think it is pretty decent for what it is. I'd definitely choose to pay for the Kindle Version. The first edition isn't worth the dead tree price, and I'm guessing the second ed. wouldn't be either unless it brews your morning coffee.

I got an idea for a side project, something like this: http://geacron.com/home-en/

Like, a map of the world, scrollable through time - wouldn't make money or anything but would be fun for me to work on and drive me to learn more about history. I haven't done any web development since messing around with ASP.NET almost ten years ago so I haven't the slightest idea how interactive web stuff is built these days - I would be rendering custom graphics on the fly (the map) and changing the data set being used in response to interactive elements (controls). What's the basic foundation that I'm working with, in terms of languages/frameworks, looking like?

Openlayers is probably what you want. You might be able to do everything you need just using the googlemaps or some other API though.

Wow, I did not expect something as detailed and specific to my needs as "everything you would ever need if you want to **** around with maps" would exist.

Any good "how to make web **** with JavaScript for C++ programmers" resources? (or anything more general but **** it, as long as we're hitting home runs here...)

Jquery on codecademy?

God no.

Goofy IDK how far down the rabbithole you want to go, but it seems like your data might be largely non-relational. If that's the case, using MongoDB and node.js seems like a good choice.

You want a client-side framework in addition to openlayers. This pretty much means either Angular (1.x) or React these days, there are tutorials out there on how to use either in combination with openlayers. The Angular vs React debate can get a bit religious, I'm normally an Angular guy but the strengths of Angular are semantic templating, prescriptiveness and collaboration, none of which seems relevant here. Gamingmouse probably has some ideas on how you should stitch React together with your back end, not my department.

He seems very knowledgeable and decent, I learnt a lot from that 30 mins video.
Thanks again, I think I will buy it.

Lol "flushing money". I do love me some JBOSS and Oracle. The future!

"mind as well"

JBOSS, Oracle, responsive websites, and mobile protocols.

No one man should have all that power.

Dude that guy is clearly a mover and shaker GETTING THINGS DONE. He sends out 1000 spammy emails before breakfast while you all dick around the internet looking for gluten-free mini-muffins. He doesn't have time to proofread every last syllable.

Have I got your attention? Good! Now are we gonna DO THIS THING or not?

I took a recruiter call yesterday because why not.

me: "I do front end development and full stack javascript development"
her: "Great, I have a coldfusion job that would be perfect for you"

I think it's going to take me a few days of reading about all this stuff to wrap my head around everything in this post. Thank you for the tips.

Random question: why JavaScript for server side things (what it looks like node.js does)? I thought the main advantage of JS is that it runs in browsers, i.e. client side.

It's pretty sweet in both imo. I create new global node components for our app in 30 minutes. I go back and look at Java code with factories of factories and 7 layers of abstraction and I want to barf.

I thought people in Torrance only hire people that live in Torrance. Do you live in Torrance, Suzzer?

Luckily there are more server languages than Java...

No need for a javascript book because there's so many blogs/tutorials. Just learn how javascript's scope works ('this', call(), apply(), bind()) and a bit about javascript prototypes (don't waste too much time going down this rabbit hole. no one actually uses anything but the most barebones inheritance pattern 99% of the time).

Learn some really basic jquery so you can manipulate content on web pages and learn how browser events and callbacks work. I recommend jquery because you'll find better beginner resources. Everything done in jquery can be done just using the browser API but it's more cumbersome and will break on old browsers.

That would be enough to start building stuff. I wouldn't bother with frameworks. I'd avoid build tools like gulp/webpack also. They're worth learning eventually but you don't need it imo.

I live in the Los Angeles area.

I always felt like Torrance is the Death Valley in the middle of LA. No one goes in; no one gets out alive.

Out of all of the places I've seen for jobs and stuff, Torrance always had the strictest demands about where you should live, and it is always "within 3 miles," which pretty much means "Torrance."

If the recruiter understood Torrance, he would have never contacted you. Clearly a fail.

For those not in the know, the "LA area" is about the size of Rhode Island.

The advantage of having the same language the whole way through is that you can throw data structures around and be confident they will be understood. For example, there's no standardised format for dates in JSON and I've had problems in the past with date formats when my Javascript communicates with a C# backend.

Using a non-relational store like Mongo, you can store JSON data directly, which reduces your server-side code to simple fetch routines.

Node.js is good for scalability in web I/O operations. There's a good article on it here: Why the Hell Would I Use Node.js?. Using node/Mongo would also get you up and running fast, without having to write server boilerplate. Suzzer would know more about this than me, but my understanding is that using node.js in combination with relational databases is not a very good idea. If you want to use Mongo you need to be really sure that you don't want the advantages a relational database provides. There's a cautionary tale here: Why you should never use MongoDB.

If you decide you'd rather have a relational backend, since you know C++ I recommend C#, ASP.NET 5 and Entity Framework 7. The latter two are both in RC1 at the moment.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, I'll read both of those. Do you (or suzzer) know in particular why Node.js is bad with relational databases? What are other JS things that I imagine need to use relational DBs (like gmail?) built on?

I have no idea about the 3 mile thing. I've never seen that.

Torrance is pretty flat and boring. But it's also basically the suburban Japantown, Chinatown, Koreatown, Vietnamesetown etc. So it has a ton of amazing cheap non-descript-looking restaurants tucked away in strip malls that aren't clogged with hipsters. It's an Asian food paradise. The Korean supermarket is a destination. On the weekend they have dozens of free sample stations. My gf buys weird vegetables and fish and stuff and I just gorge on all the samples.

The tooling isn't very mature (again, that's my understanding, suzzer would know more) and the more work you have to do server-side (i.e. relational queries to construct documents) the less good an idea node is, that's explained in that link from last post.

Gmail, being a very old app, is built with an old toolset. But you can check out Sites using React and Made With Angular (which is itself made with Angular).

Yeah from my understanding node will work fine with a RDB. It's just that usually companies looking to use node are either startups or trying to port to a new stack. RDBs aren't the choice for most of those. Also Mongo is a JSON document store so any document manipulation lends itself really easily to a platform based on JS.