Tag Archives: Review

Review: jQuery HotShot

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jQuery HotshotsI have followed and been a fan of Dan Wellman’s writing for some time and when I noticed he was asking on Twitter for people to review a new book he was writing I jumped at the chance.

I have been using jQuery for several years now on a mixture of commercial and personal websites and on various web applications and whilst I don’t always think it is the right solution for a problem, when a library is the right solution jQuery is one of the best. In my current role we heavily use jQuery so I believe I am qualified to accurately review this book.

For this review I am reading the Kindle version of jQuery HotShot which you can buy now from Packt and from Amazon, the book is also available as a paperback for all you cave-people.

jQuery HotShot

So, is jQuery HotShot a good read? Or does Dan fall into the trap that so many jQuery writers do and leave you with pages of poorly written jQuery that doesn’t conform to any best practice?

I am happy to report that true to form Dan has produced an excellent book that manages to explain some of the core features of the library in interesting and memorable ways. He has greatly increased my understanding of some of the features that make jQuery an excellent library.

With hardly any preamble we are thrown straight into a fun example of using jQuery to create a sliding puzzle game. The example manages to assume no prior knowledge but at the same time doesn’t bore someone with prior knowledge by walking at a snails pace, as the book continues the examples get more and more involved.

One of the reasons that jQuery HotShot is able to get straight into good examples is that the examples themselves are littered with little best practice tidbits, for example;

Joining an array of substrings to form a single string is much faster than building a string using the + operator on substrings, and as we’re working repetitively inside a loop, we should optimize the code within the loop as much as possible.

Without needing a chapter or section dedicated to optimisations we have been able to find out about the need to take care about what we do inside loops and also learn a quick performance tips when dealing with strings. This certainly doesn’t have any direct bearing on the task at hand, but helps point the reader towards the best way of doing things.

My favourite example used in the book is probably the Bounty Hunter mobile site that hooks into StackOverflow looking for questions to answer, but the book covers a wide range of examples including building browser add-ons using jQuery and how to build your own jQuery (which introduces things like grunt.js, node.js, git etc.).

I am kind of cheating, because I was already aware of Dan’s writing and work so I knew that he knows his stuff, but you honestly do get the impression that a real expert in their field is writing this book, the way the information is presented shows that he has a deep and broad understanding of the subject material.

Something that I loved but that some might not was how involved the examples were, by this I mean that you could tell the feature or features an example was trying to explain and there are far more concise examples that could have been used, but they would either not have been as fun or wouldn’t have had a grounding in the real world.

One small niggle I have with the book is that the terminology for the sections within a chapter don’t suit my personality, subtitles like “Prepare for Lift Off” and “Engage Thrusters” belong more in the fluffy self-help books I love to read as opposed to a technical book, but I am fully aware the majority of people probably love that kind of stuff! Another tiny irk is that one of the examples talks about infinite scrolling, and I personally think that infinite scrolling is the devil!

My Conclusions

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and as someone who has been using jQuery in anger for a very long time I did come away haven’t learnt a truck load and I imagine you will too. One day I might write a blog post about the things I have learned from this book, in the mean time you should just go ahead and buy it!

jQuery HotShot Resources

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My immediate impressions of the Samsung Chromebook

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About five minutes ago I took delivery of the Samsung Chromebook that my wonderful fiancée bought me (thanks again!)

I mention the time because this machine has to be the quickest thing I have ever set up, including phones.

The box the Chromebook came in

The Unboxing of the Chromebook

I literally unboxed it, plugged it in, pressed the power button and within seconds it asked me my WiFi password and my Google account, typed all that in and boom, all Chrome extensions, saved details, everything just came across.

My first thought when I looked at it was the keyboard looks lovely for typing on, and now I am onto my fourth paragraph I can confirm that to be the case.

My next thought was how light it is, I am comparing to a 2011 13″ MacBook Pro which maybe isn’t fair but I can hardly feel it on my knee right now, I can already tell this is going to be mega handy for writing on the go.

The Chromebook Bootup Screen

The Chromebook Bootup Screen

I am not 100% convinced on the track pad, there doesn’t appear to be a way to say I want the right mouse button to be the right hand bottom corner of the trackpad (Like I always set my Macs up to do) so I am going to have to get used to Alt+Click for when I want to right click things.

Other than that I am very happy with it so far and I look forward to playing with it more and reviewing it in a little bit more depth soon.

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Review: Mastering Redmine

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Recently I received an email asking me if I wanted to review the book Mastering Redmine, first of all I was honoured and would like to thank Kenny Dias for the opportunity.

I have been a longtime user of Redmine and have helped install and support it on several occasions, I have even written plugins to help other things talk to Redmine in the past, I guess you could call me a Redmine Power User, which I think makes me qualified to write this review.

For this review I was reading the kindle version of Mastering Redmine, which is available on Amazon or on Packt Publishing.

Anyway, without anymore preamble, here is my review!

Mastering Redmine: A review

Mastering Redmine Cover

Mastering Redmine Cover

I have to say I wish I had read Mastering Redmine about a year ago when I was setting up my last install of Redmine – the things that I had no idea you could do or the things that I knew were possible but didn’t think were worth the effort are numerous to say the least, this book is a real treasure trove of information.

You really get the sense that this has been written by someone with a strong development background, which for me is great but might leave non-developers confused with some of the terminology. This however is addressed at the start of the book saying that the examples will assume Redmine is being used for Software development and to be honest I think this is going to be the use case for Redmine 80%+ of the time.

I found that the author really holds your hand through the basics, if you where coming to Redmine for the first time this would be really useful, and are easy to skip past or use as a reference if you are already familiar with the basics of Redmine.

One real takeaway is that I have learned a lot about how you can integrate version control into Redmine, I had only really used it as a code browser before and was aware you could do some basic stuff but not to the degree as has been discussed here.

I thought it was interesting that they have decided to include a “Helping Redmine” section so early in the book – I agree with the fundamental idea of helping out projects like Redmine and agree with all of the suggestions ranging from if you were a technical to non-technical user, but I feel this should be somewhere near the back of the book instead of right in your face quiet early on.

I have always found the installation instructions that you find online for Redmine to be a little sparse and I think this book makes a far better attempt at explaining the Redmine installation process to the user. Although I must say as a disclaimer that I didn’t attempt to follow this instructions, but certainly they looked about right.

On occasion I found some of the grammar and sentence structure a little off, it wasn’t that there was anything wrong with what was written per se but some sentences did take me to read over them a couple of times. This is also a tiny bit of errata but as an ATOM reader the book suggests Google Reader, this of course isn’t really recommended anymore as it is closing down.

An issue I have had before with Redmine, and something that is highlighted in this book is that the plugin system isn’t exactly ideal and I have to say after reading this book there are so many plugins that I wish I had known about before.

The practical examples for sorting out a workflow really helped me get my head around a process that I was never really 100% sure on before.

All in all I thought this was an enjoyable and informative book, certainly it has been the best thing I have read on the subject of Redmine and would highly recommend you buy it if you are using Redmine day to day or are considering it.

Mastering Redmine: Resources

Here are some resources you might find useful:

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Review: CodeLobster

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I was recently asked by the guys at CodeLobster if I wouldn’t mind checking out their software and writing a quick review of it.

I am always more than happy to review any software or hardware, and there is nothing I like more than a nice IDE, so I jumped at the chance and for the last week, have been doing 80% of my 9-5 coding using CodeLobster

What is CodeLobster

CodeLobster is a Windows based PHP IDE, its core aim seems to be to allow you to create websites and web applications with the least amount of resistance possible. It has built in support for things like WordPress and CakePHP, which I have to say is pretty awesome.

I am not going to list out all the features present in the app, just draw attention to some of the things I like and don’t like about it, for a full rundown you can always visit the website.

What I liked about it

I really liked how out of the box it came with a lot of stuff, there was the integration with various libraries and frameworks, there was version control, there was build and debug tools – there was a lot, and of course it had your standard slew of features like syntax hilighting and auto-complete.

The first thing you will probably say is that your IDE of choice has all those things, and it probably does (pretty much all the ones I have used recently do) but they have had to be installed after the fact as plugins, never really a huge task but with CodeLobster you don’t have to.

There is a really nice feature that if you hover over a CSS property, you immediately get shown which browsers support that property, naturally this doesn’t replace testing but it does mean you can catch stuff as you write it instead of after it has been compiled, uploaded and ran.

Speaking of CSS, it also gives you a preview of the colour you are using in a property, which is something I have found plenty of editors and IDEs to be lacking.

Everything seemed really customisable, which is something more and more programs are latching onto these days, you really do get the sense this was written with web developers in mind.

The level of support I received early on was excellent too, I know they had a vested interest in keeping me happy because I was going to write a review but I did have some questions that were quickly and fully answered.

What I disliked about it

It felt a little unfinished in places, there are a couple of spelling mistakes and a couple of images have been used without due care and attention. I think perhaps it has been built by programmers for programmers, which is a good thing but maybe needs a designer to take a quick look at it and give them some notes.

It ran on Windows, not a crime in and of itself but because I run a Mac setup at home I could only really test it in work – I should say it handled our projects without a hitch and helped me out a lot.

I had to register to get a free account, this is probably to stop piracy or something but when I download something I want to install it and run it immediately – not have to fill in forms and copy keys from emails into stuff.

Final thoughts

I guess my thoughts on this are that it is a really good attempt at a PHP IDE, it ticks all the boxes I would need a development environment to tick and I would have no qualms with recommending others try out the software.

I probably won’t continue to use it much to be honest because I have found my current setup to be far more streamlined for my needs and is cross system compatible so I can run it on both of my Macs and my work PC.

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Review: The CSS3 Anthology

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Recently I bought a copy of The CSS3 Anthology by Rachel Andrew – as well as the physical copy I got a digital download of the book. I have enjoyed reading it and figured I would post up a quick review in case you were thinking of purchasing a copy and wanted to read some opinions on it.

This is my first book review since school from what I can remember, so please post any criticism as this is something I would like to get better at.

Why I bought it.

I have spent many years working with CSS and have been bitten before with buying books that are either too basic or give wrong information – and I don’t mean wrong as in out of date, I mean wrong as in the samples were never best practice and shouldn’t be followed.

Long story short, I wasn’t really in the market for a new CSS book. I was listening to the Sitepoint podcast and the interviewee for that episode was Rachel Andrew, I was already aware of Rachel’s excellent work and when I heard she was pulling together a combination of best practice I immediately thought “sold”.

Unlike many books in the market that try and teach you CSS, this book is more aimed at showing you the current thinking behind the solutions to the more common CSS problems – this is perfect for someone like me who can write CSS but has maybe spent too long writing it his way – once you know how to solve the problem of sub-menu navigation using CSS you don’t tend to re-evaluate it too often!

Why I could review this so quickly.

The book hasn’t been out long, and I know from reviewing music that you need to give whatever you are reviewing a couple of chances, letting your thoughts sink in for a couple of days and then revisiting the work to see if you still feel the same. I think this is the reason I haven’t reviewed books before – I don’t feel that one first pass is enough to be able to properly judge a book and I rarely have the time to read the same book again within a short time period.

The book only actually arrived on my desk a couple of days ago, but thanks to the fact I could immediately access a digital copy of the book I was able to read through it at my leisure from the moment I paid for it.

This meant that when the book did arrive I was able to give it one more read, compare notes and get writing!

What I liked about the book.

  • I really like how quick a read this book is. Rachel doesn’t labour on any particular point, she explains the rationale behind her choices and moves on and the examples are complete without becoming clunky.
  • I like how all the major bases are covered – I had tried to think of things that maybe should have been in there, but in my opinion the issues covered are relevant to the vast majority of front end developers.
  • I enjoyed how image rich the book was – a lot of CSS books do a before and after shot, the CSS3 Anthology does during shots as well, which is useful when you are trying to dissect the CSS being used in a solution.
  • I appreciated how the sections had relevant pop-outs – for example when talking about text-decoration Rachel explains that adding underlines to things that are not links is bad practice, this wasn’t exactly a revelation but snippets like this are useful to read.

What I disliked about the book.

  • Honestly – very little. The pictures being in grey-scale were kind of annoying when the CSS was dealing with colour, but you could always make out what was being referenced.
  • I feel bad for only putting one negative thing (and it isn’t really that negative) so my second not-really-negative point is I don’t understand why the butterfly kite used on the front cover is relevant to CSS – the tagline of the book is “Take your sites to new heights” so maybe that is why – I would have preferred height to be a play on words with the height attribute!
  • Oh, actually I do have a genuine gripe – some of the sections felt in places like adverts for Sitepoint, I know it is released by Sitepoint and I know that for a lot of things Sitepoint does have nice canonical answers to things, but at times it felt a little too much.

Conclusions.

As I am sure you picked up from reading what I disliked about the book, there wasn’t really anything – I enjoyed it and I think so long as you have a basic to good understanding of CSS you will too.

If you have read it I would love to hear your thoughts on it.

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