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Planet-Black0psBooks cover everything
A quick trip to town to get a new pair of smart trousers was quickly followed by a trip to a couple bookstores to see what computer-related books they had in stock. I was particularly looking for books on Actionscript - the RIAD assignment has got me rather curious about Flash, and Flex. what I saw was a huge array of books on different websites, such as:
-Facebook (must have been 4 different books on this, x10 copies of each)
-Creating a business on Ebay
-Becoming rich from Ebay
-Most popular websites
Along with masses of books for:
-Ubuntu Linux
-Fedora 6
-Suse 10 Enterprise
-Linux
-Linux for dummies
-* for dummies (as in, everything possible)
-Computers for Seniors
-freeBSD
-Windows XP
-Windows Vista (suprisingly only one book, one copy)
-The forgotten manual for Linux
-The forgotten manual for Photoshop
These are just a handful, but what made me 'pfft' was the extremes these books go to advertising themselves. "The forgotten manual for *" for example - it would take a serious dumbass to think that this was some book someone happened to find in the depths of Adobe, or a back office of Novell. "Photoshop cheats" was another - how exactly is it cheating to actually use Photoshop? What form of unknown method does this book teach that some industry expert, or someone with learning patience cant learn from just reading another book, or browsing online?
I'm not here to bash them though - well I am to some degree as I just did, but awell. Thing is, I like these types of books - just, ones which arent trying too hard to grab my attention on the bookshelf. I have a book called the "OpenGL Superbible" - straight to the point. It sounds more professional - rather than being called "The amazing secrets of OpenGL no one else knows!!!" or "The hidden manual for OpenGL" or "OpenGL Cheats". Its "bible" is somewhat fitting (not in a religious sense). It has so much information, its a good reference in the rear 1/3 of the book, and the tutorial sections are fairly good (damn good in places) and a nice read whilst answering a call of nature, or just a read before nodding off to sleep. Doing either of those with a laptop and a pdf is a bit...awkward.
The university decided to be incredibly generous this last week. They had a table with a sign saying "Help yourself!" Ontop was a pile of unwanted books - Cobol, Visual Basic, JSP, Networking, Structured programming, Pascal, and more. These books are heavily out of date mind - I cant see how the lecturers, in their job would need these anymore, but they have been a damn good read. Some of them I doubt ill read again, but some of the programming ones have HUGE details on creating your own binary trees, linked lists, etc. To me thats golddust, and heavily recommended if using C++. Its things like being able to implement such concepts that make a programmer stand out from the rest - the knowledge advantage they give you is at least likely to help provide a solution to a rather complex problem.
Regarding Flash - I cant say ive been dissapointed using it - I just wish there was a lot more time. Ive only just got round to implementing CellRenderers for DataGrids (I'm using ActionScript 2.0). Its not been too bad in all - Interacting with PHP isnt too bad - just, it took me days to work out why the heck it was rushing ahead before PHP had a chance to build the variables to send back to Flash. For days I ended up with a DataGrid that had sod all, except for selectable, blank rows. The solution was to setup the datagrid AFTER the dataProvider was fully loaded with the variables from PHP. ActionScript seems to be a bit 'moody' compared to other languages, but tame it, and you will NOT be dissapointed with the results. As a web developer primarily, i'm looking forward to having a sit down with this and really walloping out some great stuff (Actionscript 3 next time). It still feels strange to be adding classes as movie clips, etc. Flex though, seems a good, fit-for-purpose version. Flash is capable, but too much of it hints that its meant for managing movie playback, etc.
Assignment-wise, 2 days before this RIAD has to be in. This is proving to be a hectic last minute couple of days rush, thanks to spending DAYS working out why the heck the data from PHP just wont load into the DataGrid in time. Other than that, a java project using design patterns - Ive done alot of this assignment thankfully, and that has to be in friday. Really wishing I started the Flash much sooner though.
-Facebook (must have been 4 different books on this, x10 copies of each)
-Creating a business on Ebay
-Becoming rich from Ebay
-Most popular websites
Along with masses of books for:
-Ubuntu Linux
-Fedora 6
-Suse 10 Enterprise
-Linux
-Linux for dummies
-* for dummies (as in, everything possible)
-Computers for Seniors
-freeBSD
-Windows XP
-Windows Vista (suprisingly only one book, one copy)
-The forgotten manual for Linux
-The forgotten manual for Photoshop
These are just a handful, but what made me 'pfft' was the extremes these books go to advertising themselves. "The forgotten manual for *" for example - it would take a serious dumbass to think that this was some book someone happened to find in the depths of Adobe, or a back office of Novell. "Photoshop cheats" was another - how exactly is it cheating to actually use Photoshop? What form of unknown method does this book teach that some industry expert, or someone with learning patience cant learn from just reading another book, or browsing online?
I'm not here to bash them though - well I am to some degree as I just did, but awell. Thing is, I like these types of books - just, ones which arent trying too hard to grab my attention on the bookshelf. I have a book called the "OpenGL Superbible" - straight to the point. It sounds more professional - rather than being called "The amazing secrets of OpenGL no one else knows!!!" or "The hidden manual for OpenGL" or "OpenGL Cheats". Its "bible" is somewhat fitting (not in a religious sense). It has so much information, its a good reference in the rear 1/3 of the book, and the tutorial sections are fairly good (damn good in places) and a nice read whilst answering a call of nature, or just a read before nodding off to sleep. Doing either of those with a laptop and a pdf is a bit...awkward.
The university decided to be incredibly generous this last week. They had a table with a sign saying "Help yourself!" Ontop was a pile of unwanted books - Cobol, Visual Basic, JSP, Networking, Structured programming, Pascal, and more. These books are heavily out of date mind - I cant see how the lecturers, in their job would need these anymore, but they have been a damn good read. Some of them I doubt ill read again, but some of the programming ones have HUGE details on creating your own binary trees, linked lists, etc. To me thats golddust, and heavily recommended if using C++. Its things like being able to implement such concepts that make a programmer stand out from the rest - the knowledge advantage they give you is at least likely to help provide a solution to a rather complex problem.
Regarding Flash - I cant say ive been dissapointed using it - I just wish there was a lot more time. Ive only just got round to implementing CellRenderers for DataGrids (I'm using ActionScript 2.0). Its not been too bad in all - Interacting with PHP isnt too bad - just, it took me days to work out why the heck it was rushing ahead before PHP had a chance to build the variables to send back to Flash. For days I ended up with a DataGrid that had sod all, except for selectable, blank rows. The solution was to setup the datagrid AFTER the dataProvider was fully loaded with the variables from PHP. ActionScript seems to be a bit 'moody' compared to other languages, but tame it, and you will NOT be dissapointed with the results. As a web developer primarily, i'm looking forward to having a sit down with this and really walloping out some great stuff (Actionscript 3 next time). It still feels strange to be adding classes as movie clips, etc. Flex though, seems a good, fit-for-purpose version. Flash is capable, but too much of it hints that its meant for managing movie playback, etc.
Assignment-wise, 2 days before this RIAD has to be in. This is proving to be a hectic last minute couple of days rush, thanks to spending DAYS working out why the heck the data from PHP just wont load into the DataGrid in time. Other than that, a java project using design patterns - Ive done alot of this assignment thankfully, and that has to be in friday. Really wishing I started the Flash much sooner though.