[BOOK REVIEW] CSS MASTERY

Ever get the feelings like some publishers are all the same? Their books just don't effectively communicate(probably like this blog). Friends of ED aren't one of them. At least so far. A second book from them I've read is CSS Mastery. This book hits the target of teaching and understanding CSS. Not only does the author teach of understanding of CSS but also about many of the quirks regarding browser bugs. I've been doing web pages for about 9 years now. Still there is always more to learn. This book no matter your level of knowledge has something for you. I tend to read books cover to cover no matter if they say you can just read that chapters you need. I always learn something. So I read them all. CSS Mastery has taught me a lot and I find it an invaluable source for CSS. It now sits next to my desk along with the other useful books. Instead of in the garage with the why did I buy these books? I would encourge you all to check out this book and get a copy.

Book: CSS MASTERY: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
Authors: Andy Budd with Cameron Moll and Simon Collison
Publisher Friends of ED
Barns and Nobel


The Next book to follow this one will be somewhat different. I'm attempting to learn more about graphic design. So that when I take someone else's design and code it or modified it to fit some customer need I can keep with their design. Also I would like to be able to design my own site and have it look like a graphic design designed it.
The book's name is Designing with type by James Craig. The should be interesting.

[BOOK REVIEW] HTML MASTERY

HTML Mastery is a book for beginners or old hats and everything in between. I've read any books on HTML and mostly they say the same thing. "here are the tags, this is what they do. I hope you enjoyed our book." Thats about as helpful as a dictionary. Sure their good when you know what your are looking for and just want a limited scope of information. What about if you want to understand more about the tag and how it behaves in different browsers. Not just the behavioral in each browser but how about an understanding of how to wrote good code( I use the term code loosely regarding HTML). Good code is easy to maintain. You aren't worried about making one change and screwing everything up. Easy to read and to understand from an outsider. This book as it all. One of the best I've found for understanding HTML and how it works. Sure HTML is simple
at first but as you built your skills with JavaScript, CSS and HTML you learn just how quickly your page or web application can get complex. I recommend a purchase of this book to anyone who needs or wants a deeper understanding of HTML.

book name: HTML Mastery - Semantics, Standards, and Styling.
author: Paul Haine
publisher: Friends of ed
Barnes and Nobel

Book Review: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawins

On Intelligence is one of the best books on intelligence I have ever read. On Intelligence is insightful and on target. I have spend many years reading and theorizing on AI. Very few of the books I have read have given the kind of information that Jeff Hawkings has pointed out. He has brought forth some wonderful ideas that I think will undoubtedly give AI a new framework to work off of. He believes AI needs to be work like the neocortex, I agree and have thought this too. I just didn't understand as much about the neocortex. Much of his ideas and theories I agree with. Some of his ideas I agree with because they match many of my own thoughts and others I agree with because they have a perfectly logical connection. There are a few I think he many not have right, but those ideas are almost none. It is possible he may be right I just need to do more outside research to agree with. Overall this book has given me a better understanding of AI and gave me more of a reason to love that field. I thank him for writing one of the most interesting and insightful books on AI.

Book Title: On Intelligence
Author: Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakesless
Pub Date: Aug 2005
Barnes And Noble Link

Analyze Your Problem Better.

How many times have I started to write a program only to find out it has a major flaw, that won't be easy to fix and will require a major rewrite. There are 2 easy ways to over come this, one of which is so obvious but no one really likes to do, PLAN!

Plan out your design and code. At least give a project 5 mins of figuring out how you want it to work and the code that is needed to fulfill this. Get a sheet of real paper(yes real paper) and just jot down notes and ideas about the project. Such as doing this operation might take more resources so we might need to cache or do it in steps. Lets say you know you were going to get information from a database and then fill objects with that information. Lets say we know there might be hundreds, thousands, or even millions of objects made in all. A few mins should be put into thinking about this at least. Should you create the objects as we go? should we keep all the objects in memory till the end? Should we just wait till we reach a limit on resources and then dump what has been done to a binary file and keep loading the rest, or might there be a better way? Without thinking the solution to this could be any number of things and it is likely going to have massive problems.

The second way to make sure you will have less flaws is to just write a prototype. Yes that does mean writing the code then rewriting it again, but that doesn't mean we
have to write the whole thing. We could first write a parse for the problem as stated above and test various operations and see which might be best for your problem.

I'm sure I'll write more on this later but for now it is food for thought when working on your next project. Don't let the language own you, find a better solution than hitting your head on the desk!

Where has all the good information gone?

It seems that anymore a lot of us dive into books or search the Internet till we fall asleep on our keyboards for more knowledge. Mostly I do this in terms of understanding programming better. Have you ever searched for something and got something so complex it was out of your league, or was going to take days to understand or was too badly wrote to understand or was just so simple it didn't even come close to answering your problem? I seem to have these issues all the time. A lot of the time I end just writing it all my self with some help from the too complex version of the code. Really there needs to be a website that answers your programming problem in a relent manner. Today I tried using a newly redone search engine called ask.com for information regarding tabcontrols and painting them in C#, ask.com doesn't even process the C# for search results.. one more headache provided by a search engine. Google and yahoo usually handle these well. I've just come to the idea there needs to be a site out there that will deal with programmer's problems in a better way. Do you have any ideas? It would be a rather large job to create one.

Web broswers Rants And Raves

mainly this post is about Firefox and Internet Explorer. Opera and Netscape I have never really found useful. Firefox is Netscape reborn anew, but the user interface designers have done a 10 times better job. I will list a small amount of rant and raves about the two browsers. Netscape I always felt the interface was/is too big and bulky, of course so was Mozilla until it split off into Firefox.. Netscape always seemed slow and just plain not user friendly. Opera I find not user friendly because it just seems too complex. That doesn't mean the interface is better. it just means that the user interface designers didn't simplify it enough. They all have done a massive amount of work on their browsers which is amazing but that doesn't mean it felt useable enough.

Now on to the main course, Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. Some of this information will be about Firefox 1.5 and some of it will be about older versions.

USER INTERFACE
User Search
Internet Explorer has always had a reasonable usable interface, but Firefox has taken this to the next level. I for one have always hated dialog boxes. They pop up and just shout use me only, all eyes on me. Where in Firefox they have a nice neat bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you use it as needed. This is a nice change from the rather disturbing yell of a failed interface.

Alerts
when it comes to alerts both Internet Explorer and Firefox have got this one right, it has a nice non disturbing yellow bar that quietly sit at the top of the screen and says look there is something you should pay attention too but you can get back to me when you can. I applaud both the User Interface professionals of the Internet Explorer 6 and the Firefox teams for this design.

DESIGNING CSS
The move on the web is to use CSS for all your design and thus separate content from display. If some items are much harder in CSS this won't promote the use of CSS. My first annoyance is positioning

Positioning
In trying to align an element to the right or left inside of a container element proves to require more thought than just align=”left”. If you read a few websites they state you should just use float to move an element to the right or left in a container element.. Firefox adds extra space to the top of the element being floated and the container element. I find this both annoying and frustrating. Next you could try using margin to set it to the right side of the container element. I think Internet Explorer has it right, that when you push something all the way over it shouldn't shove the element out of the container element. So if you set a left margin to 100% then you just get your element placed to the right side of the container element. However in Firefox this would shove the element out side of the container element. Where in Internet Explorer it just makes the container element wider. This makes sense. A lot of the times I end up just using relative positioning and use something like margin 50%. That is if I don't want to absolute position everything.

Height
one of my biggest rants for a while was that Firefox wouldn't do height 100%. The work around was just a tiled background but in some cases you couldn't. When the background is already tiled for an effect, you can't just tiled the background for a work around. As of Firefox 1.5 They have fixed that issue and I for one am very happy with that. Internet Explorer never had this issue.

Pixels
Why can't pixels be the same size in both Internet Explorer and Firefox? This just gets on my nerves. Enough said.

GENERAL RANTS
HTML
Two elements that have some of the greatest uses are the div and the span. The div creates a divisor from another element and the span is something like a text span. If you use the span text it doesn't cause a new line but you can colour the text, etc. The limiting factor is that you can't set its width and height and if you use the div tag then you get a new line. What if you just want a set of text a precise width but not a new line? In this case a span or a div tag is not useful and since I'm trying not to use tables anymore, this seems to prove a less than easy task. You can always redesign your interface but this just seems to be a factor that proves annoying on many occasions.

For now this is it as far as it comes to rants and raves regarding browsers, maybe next time we'll cover Javascript.

Do we need the FCC anymore?

We live in a digital age, with electronic ideas that empowers us, then we do we still give the power away? The digital age really has given us the ability to make more things respond to individuals. Most members of any television audiences know that you can go to the FCC and file a complain when you feel the TV show you are watching is indecent. Also the FCC gets the ability to tell broadcasters what they can and can not show and at what times. This made sense in the 50's and 60's and even until the mid 90's but now we are in the 2000's. I'm not stating that we are more immoral. I'm stating that we have more technology that allows us to make decisions about what we want to watch. As audiences members we can block out anything we wish not to view. We can include a password to make sure the kids don't see these indecent things when the parents aren't around. The most widely known technology that provides censorship for TVs is the v-chip(http://www.v-chip.org/) but yet the FCC leaves higher fees each year to make a point of what they want and don't want on TV, why should they have this right? Maybe I want to sit down at 7pm, get a cold coke and watch some violent TV, but instead you are often forced to watch just what the FCC wants. I realize it is suppose to be for the good of families, but can't they change the channel or block it out? Yes, I know there are DVDs, I have many of them. Yes, I know there are cable and other paid services. This isn't the point. the point is why are we letting a group make decisions instead of the individual? Some parents doesn't even let their kids watch PG-13 movies until they are 17. These parents should have that choice. Currently they have that choice with the v-chip, but why do we need the FCC doing the same thing? The FCC seems like they are just taking extra money and fines that could have gone to better government programs and much better TV shows. The other thing I don't get is when I hear people complaining how much violence is on TV. We live in a consumer society, if you don't like something don't buy or watch it. When you buy, or watch something you are helping to promote it. No matter how much money the station has it won't keep on a show if there are no viewers. If you are truly against a show that most people watch and enjoy. Why should you get the right to complain and have a heavy fine, just to make the statement “you need to tone down the TV show.” Maybe most of the viewers don't want it toned down. If you dislike some content on a TV show do us all a favor block it out with the V-chip and change the channel, so that the rest of us can enjoy the TV show and not have it changed to fit your personal tastes of what you or your kids should or should not see. Indecency fines are for the 1920's, not for the 2000's.

http://www.filmratings.com/ (go to rating guide)
http://www.v-chip.org (censorship of TV viewing)

The Latest of the high fees by the FCC