Annual technical books purchase just before tax time.

Just lodged my order with Amazon, below are the books that I will (hopefully) read:

1. Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source
2. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity
3. The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
4. Head First Design Patterns

I think this year, I need to get my head around system architecture, a little bit on project management and learning different technologies.

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I just finished reading Dreaming in code by Scott Rosenberg.

In this book, Scott tried to answer the question on why is building software is so hard. To answer the question he spent 3 years following the development of an open source PIM project called Chandler.

It was a very interesting book albeit it’s also a quite depressing one. In the end I got the impression that we cannot find an answer why software is hard, it just is. For the case study itself, Chandler was started in 2002 and now 6 years later it only managed to reach 0.7 release.

There are some really good quotes in this book, these are few of them:

On the subject of information distribution speed by the internet:

That means you couldn’t afford to perfect anything - but no need to worry because nobody else could, either.

Their work (developers) is one percent inspiration, the rest sweat-drenched detective work; their products are never finished or perfect, just varying degress of "less broken".

Brook’s Law - Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later

In the software world, most of the choices that arise boils down to one particularly heartbreaking three-way trade-off … There’s an old saying: I can make it for you fast, cheap or good. Pick any two.

… effort to produce a "perfect spec" … would prove an infinite labor; you’d never finish spec writing and start coding.

… agile development and XP are best for small teams of experienced coders.

XP can quickly decays into a means to … "Deliver Crap Quickly"

Software developers always have more to do; the definition of "done"; … is always somewhat arbitrary… "Done" is something that you must decide for yourself.

I got introduced (and re-introduced) to some people whose work I would love to read: Frederick Brooks, Mitch Kapor, Joel Sposky, Martin Fowler etc. It was very enjoyable reading experience, I literally can’t put it down, definitely recommended reading.

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I have just finished reading designing with web standards by jeffrey zeldman.

I got the book from my local library. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this book on the shelf as the IT section of my library is not known for its currentness.

It was an interesting read, if you deal with HTML and CSS in some ways you would get something out from this book. The book starts very slowly with the history of web standards and I almost gave up after the first few chapters, I guess if you are really pragmatic, not really care about the history and you do not need to be convinced about adhering to the web standards then you can safely skip the first four chapters.

Below are some of the interested points that I learned from the book:

• I finally got the distinctions between HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Strict.
• Layout using table is NOT evil. I know it may come as a shock for CSS purists, I was shocked myself to read this from a CSS guru. What he’s trying to say is: table might still be used for layout for the sake of backward compatibility as CSS isn’t well supported on the older browsers, the best approach is to have a hybrid layout combining both tables and CSS to avoid nested tables.
• Accessibility is something that I never would have thought of when doing my HTML and CSS. But it’s apparently not that hard to create more accessable sites, chapter 14 has thorough guidelines on how to do so.
• I was being reminded of the importance of semantic markup. H1 means something, semantically it means this is important content not merely saying this font is big. So H1 should contain more important information than H2 and it’s not merely saying H1 has larger font than H2
• After 2 years working with designers, I now know why they talk font size to me in points not pixels! It’s the designers’ lingo apparently, it’s good to find out how points related to pixels. Also some other size related issues like: is it better to use em or px?

Overall it’s a good book to read, but not the book that I would buy and have it on my shelf. I found the book spent a lot of content on the history. In some occasions the author presented different approaches to design problem but he dwells on the individual approaches quite deeply and in the end I didn’t feel his strong recommendation on one or some of the approaches. I personally would like just to be told: “always use pixels for your font size” rather than reading 10 pages going back on forth about points, pixels, percentages and ems.

I still think this a book worth reading, it will make you better web designers and web developers. Now, for my next CSS reading material I am interested in reading Bulletproof Web Design.

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I just finalized my purchase at Amazon.com. Over the next few weeks, I will be waiting anxiously for these to arrive at mailbox:

• Web Design: The L Line, The Express Line to Learning (The L Line: The Express Line To Learning)
• Coldfusion MX Developer’s Handbook
• Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Certified Developer Study Guide

I finally decided to get Web Design: The L Line, The Express Line to Learning (The L Line: The Express Line To Learning). It covers wide ranging topics such as SEO and doctypes, which I don’t really need. I just hope that this will be a good and informative read, as I am not 100% sure that this is what I want.

I originally planned to get Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit as well, there was a 2nd hand version sold for USD18.95, however I didn’t add it in on my shopping cart and it was no longer available today. The next cheapest option is to buy it new from Amazon.com itself, which will leave a USD37 hole on my pocket. So I decided to give it a miss this time as I my end of financial year splurge has already AUD20 more than I budget it for, furthermore I think the 2 Coldfusion books that I ordered will cover similar grounds to that book anyway.

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I am currently in the process of getting a book (or some books) on web design. What I am looking for is a book that covers:
1. principles of web design (like usability)
2. layout, typography, color theories, the usage of graphics
3. and how to create layout using image editing software like Photoshop or Illustrator (although I actually will use GIMP, but let’s face it, books for graphic/web designers will not have GIMP on them).

I probably don’t want books that cover HTML and CSS extensively as I’m already comfortable with them. I actually want to learn more on web design steps prior HTML and CSS are produced.

I have spent few days browsing Amazon.com but I still can’t find a book that really fits with I want. Hm! I just realised that I probably should ask the 2 designers at work DOH, too late now, books have to be purchased before the end of financial year.

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