Ma Petite Chouchou

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Sunday, July 30, 2006

Reading books

I'm currently reading 2 or 3 books, among other things. Two of them happen to be the same publisher O'Reilly... while the last one is SitePoint. Head Rush Ajax and Head First Design Patters and Build your own site the right way using XHTML and CSS So far I'd recommend all of these books. All three of them teach through example and none of the pages are complete boxes of text, you see how the code effects the page.

The book on XHTML and CSS is definitely for beginners, I skipped the first chapter and a half. It goes so far as assuming nothing, even that you know what a browser does. I almost put it down at that point but I kept with it. I taught myself CSS online just looking at what others had done and feel that to make sure I was staying within standards and all a basic book might be a good idea. And this book does what I want. The writing is entertaining and I can almost here a British dude narrating it! Though that's more to do with the fact that I heard about the book from a British podcaster but, that's later.

On to the Head Rush/First books. I like the way they are very graphical and example driven. You lean what you need as it is needed and each example involves more plus what you have used in the last chapter. I also think it's great for anyone who has problems with short attention span. There are little quizzes along the way and it's a very practical way of learning instead of the theoretical approach you might get in other books.

As you can see I'm on a webdev kick. I think it's really interesting and plan on applying what I"m learning to some forms and a site that I help that is currently all in asp. I think Ajax would be great for it and even help keep down user error.

I'm always open to other book recommendations, in pretty much anything.

Labels: ajax, books, css, review, tech, web design

posted by mpcc @ 7/30/2006 04:47:00 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Yahoo Groups and 10 week free AJAX course

I'm not a big fan of yahoo groups. Don't get me wrong, they had their time. But today with wikis and forums why deal with all that in an email?

There is a 10 week free AJAX course going on and originally the main form of communication was a yahoo group. With over 4000 people that's a hell of a lot of hello emails. So someone (many but this one was just faster in execution) in class got a great idea to start a wiki for the class and a forum (which I get to be a moderator in :)).

It may just be me but having to search through emails to find answers seams to be harder than just going to wiki to get info or asking a question on the forum. Even if you have gmail and searching your email is no big deal still. Why when we have wikis and forums at our disposal?

If you want to check out the class check out the teachers site above and the AJAXWorkshop wiki.

I'm not entirely sure why I'm blogging so much this weekend. Perhaps it's taking my mind off the demo I have to do of my summer project to 10 people to see if it would be useful for another project? Hmm maybe.

Labels: ajax, class, freebe, tech

posted by mpcc @ 7/23/2006 09:30:00 PM 0 comments

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