Books

I'm not a fan of the Software Craftsmanship movement. Well, i do love the goals and the principles behind it but i kinda dislike the terminology they've chosen to try to spread those goals and principles. It has this elitist connotation to it which just rubs a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of trying to pull people in to the concept of continuous improvement, this whole "i'm an apprentice! i'm a journeyman! i'm a master!" thing just makes us look kinda stupid. It's just rather off-putting to many of the people we ought to try to reach. In fact, i wouldn't be surprised if this movement would've gotten more traction and less blog-o-drama if they'd simply called themselves the Continuous Improvement movement. No silly metaphors that don't hold up in this day and age, no titles to be earned, no roles to be played. Just people continuously trying to get better and helping others to improve as well. Which sort of captures the essence of it, no? Alas, Software Craftsmanship it is.

It is with that opinion in mind that i was at first hesitant to read Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman. But when i glanced over the table of contents, i couldn't help but think that this is the kind of stuff i wished was available when i first started my career. So i figured i had to give it a shot. And i'm glad i did. It's a very quick read (only 168 pages) but it does have a lot of great advice for people who want to become better developers. The only downside about this book is that you have to continuously read about the whole apprentice/journeyman/master thing. If the authors had left out the craftsmanship-fantasy and background, they probably could've gotten the exact same amount of great advice in just about 100 pages.

But again, despite the issues i have with the craftsmanship terminology, the actual content of this book is fantastic. I've been applying a lot of those patterns over the past couple of years and they've benefited me greatly. And there are a couple of them that i really want to incorporate in my 'routine' as well. By reading this book, you'll either learn a lot about how you can make yourself better or if you feel like you're already there, you'll at least know of a reference to pass to other people you want to assist on their journey of Continuous Improvement. I'm sorry, i meant their apprenticeship. It really is a blueprint to becoming a Jedi. I'm sorry, i meant master craftsman. Or just a very valuable and great developer.

Going by the hype surrounding HTML5, you'd think it's all about animations and taking away the need to use proprietary plugins like Flash and Silverlight. But there's plenty more interesting things in HTML5 (or the related technologies) which you can already start using in your web applications. Brian P. Hogan does an excellent job covering a lot of them in this book.

The first chapter gives you a good overview on what exactly HTML5 and CSS3 will allow you to do, and also contains a helpful list of tags and attributes that will be deprecated in the HTML5 specification. After that, the book is split up in 3 larger parts:

1. Improving User Interfaces
2. New Sights And Sounds
3. Beyond HTML5

The first part consists of 4 chapters that cover how you can improve the things that you're already doing with HTML. You'll learn about new structural tags and attributes that help you avoid 'divitis', how you can create much better forms, and a bunch of new CSS selectors that'll make your CSS code much cleaner and easier. Finally, you'll learn more about how to make sure that your pages are accessible to people who require assistive technology to browse your site/webapp. What's really interesting about these chapters is that for each new thing that is discussed, fallback strategies for browsers that don't support the new features are covered as well.

The second part covers the features that most of the hype surrounding HTML5 is based on: drawing on the canvas, embedding audio and video in your pages and some very interesting eye candy features from CSS3 such as rouding corners, drop shadows, element rotation, gradients and the improved font features.

The final part covers some technologies that are often associated with HTML5 but aren't actually part of the specification. Things like client-side storage options, managing browser-history, cross-document messaging, web sockets and geolocation. Each of these are covered with clear examples. The final chapter covers some topics that are likely to change in the near future but it gives you a good idea on what to expect from CSS transitions, web workers, WebGL, IndexedDB, Drag & Drop and client-side validation.

Overall, the quality of writing is excellent, the examples are very clear and despite being a quick read at 231 pages (not counting the appendices) it covers quite a lot of interesting things, most of which you can indeed start using today. This book won't make you an expert on any of the topics it covers though, nor is that its intention. It is a great way to get started with these new features and technologies though, and encourages you to dig deeper.

As good as the jQuery documentation is, i generally prefer to pick up a good book whenever i want to learn something new. And if you're new to jQuery, Manning's jQuery In Action is pretty much the perfect one to pick up. It (obviously) starts with the basics, moving further continuously while hardly ever showing too much new stuff at once. You'll quickly become familiar with the basic principles that jQuery revolves around and the book then gradually builds upon that with each chapter.

I'm not going to go over everything that's covered in the book (just check out the table of content here), but i can't imagine you'll have any questions left about jQuery after finishing this book. Everything is explained very clearly and thoroughly and the authors do an admirable job of avoiding boring parts. The only times where it's (predictably) less interesting (though, i wouldn't call that boring) is when you're presented with lots of reference-like documentation. In most cases, it's only a few pages but sometimes it's just a little bit too much. That's pretty much the only bad thing that can be said about this book.

One thing that i would like to point out is that, in my opinion, previous experience with or knowledge of JavaScript isn't really a requisite before reading this book. The little JavaScript-specific knowledge that you need to be productive with jQuery (a testament to jQuery's elegance, clarity and overall quality) is covered in an appendix which will most likely be sufficient for most people, at least to those who're somewhat used to looking at other programming languages from time to time. That's not to say that it's not worth learning more about JavaScript (some of the next books i'll read are specifically focused on JavaScript actually), i just don't think you need in-depth JavaScript knowledge to use jQuery effectively.