Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard My rating: 5 of 5 stars I need to start by saying that this is one of the best technical books I have ever read. To me, it’s easily as enjoyable and useful as Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer, or The Mythical Man Month. If… [Read more…]
February 3, 2010
Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide by Dave Thomas My rating: 4 of 5 stars In general, this book does a fairly good job of helping you create a rails-based application. Part 3 includes some great in-depth information on the topics that are briefly discussed in Part 2. I only have one real… [Read more…]
August 21, 2009
I was recently tasked with writing a command-line script in Jruby that performed simple CRUD operations against a simple database table. I’ve written tons of scripts in the past that manipulated tables, but I had never done so using Jruby. I therefore decided to first write a “bare-minimum” test script that would help me dip… [Read more…]
February 15, 2008
A friend of mine recently volunteered to update and maintain a web site for a local non-profit. He basically wants to clean up the formatting on the site (using CSS whenever possible), add more rich media such as flash-based slide shows, and make it more collaborative by adding features like a forum. Of course, since… [Read more…]
February 14, 2008
How I learned that using objects, even in a small script, can make you more efficient and you software more flexible and effective. The Problem Between work, home, and about a half-dozen operating systems, I use a lot of different backup programs. Most of these programs use some sort of snapshot-based process where you have… [Read more…]
February 14, 2008
I’ve been using the Groovy programming language a lot lately at work to programmatically interact with systems that have Java interfaces. Simply put, it’s great, and it really makes my job as a sysadmin of Java middleware easier. Also, if you’ve tried other Java-based scripting languages like Jython in the past but have been disappointed… [Read more…]
June 12, 2010
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