Book Review: Mobile JavaScript Application Development: Bringing Web Programming to Mobile Devices by Adrian Kosmaczewski (O'Reilly)

This is an excellent book that focuses on using Javascript (and only Javascript with HTML and CSS) for mobile application development. The author introduces HTML5 in chapter 1 which is a must for developing using Javascript on the mobile devices. He also introduces the Modernizer library to test for HTML5 features for cross-browser compatibility. Snippets of code that introduce the reader to Geolocation, Orientation, Device motion, Network connectivity, Canvas, Client-side storage, etc, set the base for the future chapters. Chapter 2 is a quick introduction on using Javascript productively by avoiding common pitfalls.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide a detailed coverage on jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, and PhoneGap. These are the leading frameworks for Javascript Mobile development. Chapter 6 completes the gap by going over debugging and testing using Jasmine and Siesta and other tools, like Adobe Shadow and iWebInspector. Chapter 7 concludes by providing a comparison of various frameworks and when to use what.

Overall, this book is very pleasant to read and is really geared towards folks evaluating different JavaScript mobile frameworks and didn't know where to start. This book will make it easy for you to decide what's suitable for your application.

Video Review: Fluent Conference: JavaScript & Beyond Complete Video Compilation

I think this is the first time that O'Reilly has held a JavaScript & Beyond conference totally focused on JavaScript based technologies. The video compilation is an excellent collection of presentations from the stalwarts who have defined and shaped the JavaScript industry.

If you can make time for 54 hours or even half of that, you would come out technically stronger and make an impressive impact at your workplace. I was amazed at some of the presenters' in-depth knowledge and command of the technology while appreciating the simplicity in presenting the concepts. I have watched about half of this compilation and I am going to watch the other half including keynotes. I have already started making an impact at work with the knowledge gained from these videos. I feel more empowered to talk about concepts at work since they are now clear.

If you missed attending the conference in person, this is the next best thing and there is no doubt about it. It's totally worth the money even if you watch half of the videos.

Web Design Bibliography (O' Reilly)

This is a good compilation of web design related categories. The categories are classified into - Web design fundamentals, Planning, Web Coding, Web Design Toolkit, Usability, Imagery and Illustration, Advanced Graphic Design, Design Lifestyle and Business, Mobile Design, and Content Management Systems.

This book provides a handy reference to all currently available books on Safari pertaining to a particular category. Safari online links are provided for each item.

My only disappointment is that all of the items listed in this book are Safari online items. There are no references to anything outside of Safari like blogs, web articles, etc. This makes the book appear more like a Safari catalog than a bibliography.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra by Shin Takahashi (Trend-Pro Co Ltd)

To be honest I haven't touched Linear Algebra for 20+ years. I had a gruelling time in high school just trying to keep up with an insane syllabus that I didn't have the time to really understand the purpose of Linear Algebra in real life. To make it worse, my professors didn't bother to explain either as they had a lot of topics to cover in very little time. So it was all mechanical learning trying to solve problems and proofs without understanding why. I always had this feeling in me that my learning of linear algebra was incomplete in spite of scoring well in Math. So 20 years later I picked up this book out of sheer curiosity whether my learning could be completed.

I must say I am very impressed with the approach of this book. The author has made learning delightful using a comic format with two kids - one a math wiz trying to explain it to the other who is struggling. At a steady pace, the book covers a lot of the basic concepts of linear algebra like vectors, matrices, Gaussian elimination, subspaces, dimension, and linear span. The author makes it interesting by explain how they apply in computer graphics, cryptography, and engineering. I finished reading the entire book in 3 hours! It all just came back to me after 20+ years! Thanks to this book, I am glad that my kids will not be struggling to understand math when they go to high school.

Albert Einstein said, "You have really learned something if you can explain it to your grandmother". I can confidently say I have learned the concepts of Linear Algebra thanks to this book and I can teach it to my grandmother (if she is willing to learn!).

Book Review: Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition (O'Reilly) by Andrew Lee Rubinger and Bill Burke

I was not a big fan of EJBs as the previous versions of the spec left me baffled and frustrated. I kept away from learning EJBs as not one at my work place seemed to care about them either. With EJB 3.1 there has been a renewed interest on this topic and so I started reading "Enterprise JavaBeans 3.1, 6th Edition - O'Reilly".

I think the authors have done a good job starting with the basics in the first section of the book explaining what the purpose of EJBs are and how the container takes care of providing services so we can focus on writing the business logic instead of re-writing plumbing and cross-cutting code.

Section two of the book provides chapters of the book provide a coverage on the various types of beans with practical examples on when each is suitable to use. I really enjoyed this section of the book as I could relate it with my daily life as a programmer.

Section three and four focus on Entity beans and Container services but I read them lightly as I don't have much interest in going too deep into those. Section five of the book wraps up with lots of practical examples (like recipes) on each bean type. I enjoyed reading this section of the book as well.

Overall, I think this book is much better than reading the EJB 3.1 spec online and the authors have done a great job in bringing the spec to life with practical examples and simplified language.

Book Review - Node: Up and Running by Tom Hughes-Croucher and Mike Wilson (O'Reilly)

If you have heard of Node (which true web developer hasn't!) but haven't had the courage to get your feet wet, Node: Up and Running (O'Reilly) is the book to get. In a true "up and running" style, this book assumes zero knowledge of Node, other than a familiarity with JavaScript. This book is well-written with lots of example code snippets generously thrown inside the book.

This book is not the book to learn JavaScript. The authors have provided clear and concise examples on using Node to assist you as much as possible to write robust, scalable, and maintainable Node applications. I haven't seen a better book on Node and the material online just doesn't compare.

Book Review: Just Spring Integration by Madhusudhan Konda (O'Reilly)

This is a concise, well-thoughtout book, with absolutely no fluff. Madhusudhan has done a great job of simplifying the landscape of Spring Integration into seven useful chapters. The first two chapters lay the groundwork of spring integration covering how and why spring makes business-2-business and application-2-application integration simple. I always thought spring integration was complex until I read this book. Chapters 3 and 4 cover message channels and endpoints in more depth. No discussion of spring integration is complete without discussion how to transform data from one format to another and that is covered in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 covers flow components and Chapter 7 finishes the book with a coverage of the various adapters like file, FTP, JMS, and JDBC.

Overall, I must applaud the author for keeping it simple and to the point and not using any fluff or unnecessary words to fill pages in the book. I really enjoy this style of writing as it helps me keep the focus and also use this book as a ready reference in case of emergency.