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Month: April 2015

Veronica Mars: The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas

I love me some Veronica Mars, it was one of the few non-sci-fi shows I watched in real time. Kristen Bell and her friends just work for me.

Kristin Bell narrates the audiobook and does an amazing job, I felt like I could hear the actors from the show laughing about her impersonations of them. She really nails some of them and gets close enough with the others that it made the story even better.

The story written by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham is a solid one that could have easily been of handful of TV episodes. The Veronica Mars vibe is alive and well.

From the publisher:

The first book in an original mystery series featuring 28-year-old Veronica Mars, back in action after the events of Veronica Mars: The Movie. With the help of old friends – Logan Echolls, Mac Mackenzie, Wallace Fennel, and even Dick Casablancas – Veronica is ready to take on Neptune’s darkest cases with her trademark sass and smarts.

©2014 Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham (P)2014 Random House Audio

I rate this audiobook a 10 out of 10 and recommend to anyone who loves Veronica Mars!

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Udemy Course: All about Node.js

I am working on a personal side-project for some friends and decided to build it using Node, Express, Mongo, and Passport.

About the time I was working on the database architecture I received a coupon via email for the Udemy course “All about Node.js” taught by Sachin Bhatnagar. The full price for the course is currently $150 but it comes up on-sale from time-to-time and coupons are often available.

The course is 64 lectures with 8 hours of video and a handful of quizzes. It took me 3 weeks to work my way through all of the lectures as I was also reading a couple of books on Safari Books Online and Learn All The Node http://www.learnallthenodes.com/.

Sachin’s class is great; the lectures about using Amazon’s CloudFront and EC2 alone are worth the full price of $150. He is very articulate, easy to understand, and does a great job breaking complicated systems into easy to digest lessons.

From the course description:

“My intent is hand hold you all the way from writing your first NodeJS app to deploying production level apps on the cloud.”

What am I going to get from this course?

  • Over 64 lectures and 7.5 hours of content!
  • Build High Performance and Scalable Apps using NodeJS
  • Use NodeJS Streams to write a Web Server
  • Use the Node Package Manager (NPM) for managing dependencies
  • Use the Express 4 Framework for building NodeJS Apps
  • Use the Hogan Templating Language
  • Understand MongoDB as a NoSQL Database
  • Create & Use MongoDB Databases using services like MongoLab
  • Create Realtime Apps that use Web Sockets
  • Upload & Resize Images using NodeJS
  • Integrate Authentication using Social Media Sites like Facebook
  • Structure the NodeJS app into modules
  • Create and Deploy EC2 Cloud Server Instances on Amazon Web Services
  • Create and Use Amazon’s S3 Storage Service with NodeJS
  • Use Amazon’s Cloudfront Service
  • Using Amazon’s Elastic IP
  • Configure Security Groups, Ports & Forwarding on Amazon EC2
  • Deploy a NodeJS app on the EC2 Instance
  • Deploy a NodeJS app on Heroku
  • Deploy a NodeJS app on Digital Ocean
  • Install & Deploy NGINX as a Reverse Proxy Server for NodeJS Apps
  • Configure NGINX as a Load Balancer

What is the target audience?

  • Web Designers & Front End Developers who wish to extend their knowledge of Javascript for building high performance network applications.
  • Software Developers who want to build high performance network applications.
  • Absolute beginners with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript, wanting to upgrade to professional Web Development and Building Web Apps.
  • PHP, ASP.net, Perl, Java & Ruby coders wanting to leap onto the Node.Js bandwagon.
  • Anyone who wishes to get hands-on training with setting up an Amazon EC2 Instance with a host of other services like Cloudfront, Elastic IP and S3
  • Anyone who wishes to get hands-on training with deploying a NodeJS app on the cloud
  • Computer Engineering students
  • Tech Entrepreneurs who want to get their hands down and dirty with Web Coding & App Development.
  • Anyone who wishes to stay on the forefront of technology!

I rate the Udemy Course: All about Node.js a 10 out of 10 and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn Node.js and its surrounding technologies and frameworks.

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