Blogs

My wife and I read a lot of books. Now that our son has gotten a little older and needs less attention, I go through more than a book a week on average, Bobbie doesn’t go through as many books in number, but she is reading much larger non-fiction books and taking copious amounts of notes. Many years ago I bought Delicious Library 2 (DL2) as a part of a bundle deal. Bobbie and I used it to catalog all of our fiction and collectable books. It worked well enough and with some simple PHP and YUI coding I built a simple web page we could use on our phones to check our library while out and about. ...

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone. I enjoyed the movie Payback with Mel Gibson, even though I think John Myhre ruined the theatrical release, which got me interested in reading the book that it was based on. This is that book. But before reading this book, forget the theatrical release of the movie entirely. This is a dark book with a lead character that is not likeable in any way. I suspect there are plenty of people out in the world that would like to think of themselves as being a lot like Parker, hard, mean, uncaring and as tough as nails. But if they are like Parker they do not have any friends and will lead a very lonely and hard life. ...

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone. I bought this book based on reviews at Audible and my love of Star Wars. As a kid I read the novelizations and Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which were all great. Timothy Zhan does a good job of adding depth to the Star Wars universe and giving us a little more insight into the relationships between Han, Chewbacca, and Lando. ...

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone. This book was fun, there are a couple of stand-out stories here, but overall it didn’t really wow me. It is definitely worth listening to if you have any favorite authors with stories in it. From the publisher: In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) – then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story. In the world of Rip-Off!, “Call me Ishmael” introduces a tough-as-nails private eye – who carries a harpoon; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz inspires the tale of an aging female astronaut who’s being treated by a doctor named Dorothy Gale; and Huckleberry Finn leads to a wild ride with a foul-mouthed riverboat captain who plies the waters of Hell. Once you listen to Rip-Off! you’ll agree: If Shakespeare or Dickens were alive today, they’d be ripping off the authors in this great collection. The stories included in Rip-Off! are: “Fireborn” by Robert Charles Wilson “The Evening Line” by Mike Resnick “No Decent Patrimony” by Elizabeth Bear “The Big Whale” by Allen M. Steele “Begone” by Daryl Gregory “The Red Menace” by Lavie Tidhar “Muse of Fire” by John Scalzi “Writer’s Block” by Nancy Kress “Highland Reel” by Jack Campbell “Karin Coxswain” or “Death as She Is Truly Lived” by Paul Di Filippo “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal “Every Fuzzy Beast of the Earth, Every Pink Fowl of the Air” by Tad Williams “Declaration” by James Patrick Kelly As a bonus, the authors introduce their stories, explaining what they ripped-off – and why. Rip-Off! was produced in partnership with SFWA – Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. Gardner Dozois served as project editor. For more books from the authors of Rip-Off! click here. ©2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. (P)2012 Audible, Inc. ...

Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas C. ZakasI read this book using Safari Books Online using various laptops and an iPad. This is an amazing book. Following a style guide while programming is common in many languages, but for me it is a new idea in JavaScript. Reading Douglas Crockford’s Style Guide http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html can teach you a lot, but Maintainable JavaScript teaches you not only the how, but also the why. ...

I bought these books from Audible and listened to them using the Audible App on my iPhone. The Human Division is something different, it is a collection of 13 short stories that take place in the “Old Man’s War” universe. This review is of the first 10 books in the series as the last 3 are not yet available. I am a huge fan of John Scalzi’s writing and the first two books from Old Man’s War were pretty great. But now I have grown tired of the series and don’t feel like it is doing much anymore. My guess is that I will continue to listen to any new “Old Man’s War” books that come out in the future, but they will not be my first choice, if something else is available, I will read that first. ...

CodecademyI first learned about Codecademy last year and I immediately jumped into it and completed a few of the JavaScript courses and promptly forgot about it. Lately I have been writing more and more JavaScript and jQuery to make interactive prototypes for work. I rate my JavaScript skills somewhere around intermediate and I am challenging myself to work my way up to expert by the end of the year. As a part of that personal challenge I have been reading a lot of JavaScript, jQuery, and Git books and websites, this is how I ended up back on the Codecademy website. ...

I read this book on O’Reilley’s Safari Books Online using personal and work laptops along with the Safari Books app on an iPad. I really like the Adobe Classroom in a Book series and have read many of them. They are great because they are based on real-world use and come with all of the files needed to build the projects used in them. ...

I read this book on [Safari Books Online](http://www.safaribooksonline.com" title=“http://www.safaribooksonline.com) using Firefox. I am doing more and more with jQuery and went looking for a book that could show me the ins-and-outs of it and “Pro jQuery” is definitely that book. I do not agree that this is a “Pro” book as it does not cover professional techniques for programming in JavaScript using the current best practices that you would find in a production environment, but this book is a great reference for jQuery and I could find none that were better. ...

What the heck does “Repsonsive” mean when it comes to a web site? For my own practical purposes it means that I have a single web site with one set of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript being served to all web browsers, but the appearance of the website changes based upon the width of the web browser’s window to give a great viewing experience to everyone. Haha, that is a mouthful. ...