Info Laptop

With the new year just around the corner, here are a few books you may want to consider reading as part of your New Year’s resolutions.  I’ve read/own these and can fully recommend them from personal experience.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

For anyone that spends a significant amount of time coding, this book is definitely a must have.  It will give you a new way of looking at the way you design and code, essentially turning it into an artform instead of just a routine task.  Being pragmatic means being practical and efficient.  Spend a few hours skimming through this book and you’ll save hundreds of hours later on. You can read my book review here.

Beautiful Code
Beautiful Code is a collection of short case studies written by lead programmers from around the world.  Anyone that likes learning by example will love this book.  What better way to learn than from other people’s mistakes and experiences?

Code Complete by Steve McConnell
This book is similar to Pragmatic Programmer in that it talks about a lot of the same stuff.  No harm in reading both though since they offer a slightly different slice of the same pie.  I strongly believe that computer science courses should teach these concepts to all programmers so that programming can become anyone can love doing.

Regular Expression Pocket Reference
This one isn’t just a must-read, it’s a must have! Regular expressions are a mixed bag for programmers.  Most will find that they are extremely useful when needed and can make a complex problem very elegant.  However, most will also find that they don’t practice them often enough to fully master them.  This is why I find this pocket reference to helpful.  It includes examples in all of the popular languages APIs (Java, PHP, .NET and C#, Python, vi, JavaScript, Ruby etc.)

The Case of the 500 Mile E-mail
This last must-read isn’t a book but rather a very funny and interesting story of a campus E-mail administrator who comes across an impossible problem.  I won’t ruin any more of it, but definitely read it for a good laugh!

What other good books (not necessarily computer related) would you recommend as a must-read for a programmer?

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I just spent the last couple hours updating Wordpress and all plugins to their latest versions!  It has been a while since I’ve done that and it seems like Wordpress got quite the overhaul in version 2.7 with some pretty interesting features, the most important one being automatic future updates.  This is a godsend since updating Wordpress up until now has been unnecessarily primitive and tedious.  Hopefully the automatic updates won’t break any customizations I’ve used on this blog.

Unfortunately the new version of the Defensio anti-spam plug-in broke my layout so I’ve gone back to Akismet for now. I also installed Kontera on a few sites since Google Adsense is performing way under par on all my of sites these past few months.  We’ll see if Kontera will supplement it well!

Please let me know if anything on the site is broken!

Happy holidays and a happy new year! I hope everyone got what they want this gift giving season!

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   Ardjuna takes a look at the first mobile quad-core notebook we’ve seen. Can this and the M17’s ATI CrossFire X graphics deliver gaming nirvana? … More Info

If you’re a gadget loving person like myself, today had two exciting announcements from Lenovo and Dell in terms of notebook offerings.

Dual Screen Madness
First, Lenovo announced an option for a secondary 10.6″ 768×1280 monitor to their line of W700 workstation/desktop replacement laptops.

Dual monitor on a laptop! That is a dream come true for me and workplaces all around the world since adding a secondary monitor is the biggest productivity booster!

Weighing in at 10 lbs, it’ll be quite a workout to move this around day to day but the tradeoff is well worth it if you only move your laptop once in a while.

Thinner and Lighter than Air
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Dell mentioned that their new line of computers, the Dell Adamo will be coming soon and may be thinner and lighter than the Macbook Air and as much as $400 cheaper!

No other details are available at this point but I have a feeling it’s going to be an exciting 2009 for technology!

What do you think? Dual screen on a laptop too much?  Thinner than Macbook Air unnecessary? Can’t be too thin or have too much monitor real estate in my opinion!

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Last week when I was taking the bus in London, Ontario (not London, England), I noticed that my bus was seasonally painted and featured a big Tux (the Linux penguin) on the front hiding amongst other not nearly as cool penguins!

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me at the time but someone from comp.os.linux.advocacy managed to snap a picture of it!

I’m not sure as to the attributions required for using Tux in public advertising but I’m sure somebody is laughing quietly to themselves knowing bus drivers are unwittingly spreading OSS.

Perhaps a distant relative to the Firefox bus?

Original Flickr Photostream

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