Category Archives: Uncategorized

Books for a JavaScript developer

You Don’t Know JS (book series)
Free online: https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=You%20Don%27t%20Know%20JS

I’m reading this now (on the 3rd book). It does a very thorough deep dive into JS.
The author is really good, and I like that the individual books are small and approachable. It does get a bit opinionated at times.

Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-JavaScript-Ninja-John-Resig/dp/1617292850

From the author of JQuery. Very readable, solid examples. Goes deep.

Eloquent JavaScript
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-JavaScript-Modern-Introduction-Programming/dp/1593275846
Free Online: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

One of the best introductions to programming/JS I’ve read. Very well put together and the online version has runnable examples.
I haven’t made it all the way through this one, but my impression is that introductory chapters are the most valuable

Mostly adequate guide to Functional Programming (in javascript)
Free Online: https://github.com/MostlyAdequate/mostly-adequate-guide

This book isn’t really for beginners. I’ve been tackling this just a little bit at a time for the last 6 months or so.
If you want to learn functional programming in JS, this is the best guide I know of.

Clean Code (NOT JS specific)
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882

I always recommend this (non-JS-specific) one to people too — definitely the most influential book to my programming style that I’ve read. Might not be super helpful in actually getting a job, but it will definitely make you better at it once you get one.

Announcing Abstract Evolution Blog

My friend Mark Conklin (from ThoughWorks) and I have been planning on creating a blog together for the better part of a year.

Last night, that blog took its first steps.

http://abstract-evolution.com/

It is an ugly baby to be sure, but don’t judge it too harshly. The one blog post there should only be considered a first draft, and an incomplete one at that.

We decided to roll our own static blog generator, that uses a local build to turn Markdown files that look like this:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abstract-evolution/blog/master/posts/static-blog-generator.md

Into blog posts that look like this:

http://abstract-evolution.com/static-blog-generator.html

I plan on linking blog posts here as they are completed, so stay tuned for more!

Link

30+ Upvotes! That makes me kindof like a celebrity.

Its a writeup on how you can use js / no-js classes to target css whether or not JavaScript is enabled.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/12410668/363701

EDIT: I’m now at 60!

Pro-tip for those who want to grab some StackOverflow nerd-points: Find a post with lots of views where the existing answers could be elaborated on, or consolidated into one bigger better answer. Do a good job on it, and watch the sweet karma points roll in.

“Can you recommend a good CSS book?”

I’m a pretty big book Geek. In my estimation, I own hundreds of books, probably 50+ about programming and computer stuff. Hell, I have more than 10 JavaScript books.

But I had to answer this question: NO

I own a couple CSS books, but they’re out of date now (5+ years old) with the new CSS3 stuff, etc… Looking at Amazon for straight-up CSS books, these 2 looked most promising. Everything by authors I’m familiar with however is now out-of-date.
After putting in some thought and research however, I came to the conclusion that reading a book on CSS is probably going to not be even the most efficient way to learn it. We learn best by doing, and in smaller chunks than books. CSS is ideal for learning online, and by doing.
Great Sources for online CSS Tutorials
My favorite site for CSS (and more) articles, videos, demos, etc..
More excellent CSS tutorials:
Any new serious CSS development at any significant scale nowadays should probably use a CSS pre-processor (like SASS or LESS) and perhaps some sort of CSS framework (Bootstrap, Foundation, COMPASS, etc…).
Other cool new css stuff includes different standards/conventions for css organization/class naming etc..

gpAlbum plugin! [proof of concept / demo]

I just finished a rough port of my fbAlbum code to use google+!

This means you can use my jQuery plugin to embed photos from your Google Plus album on your own webpage, just like my fbAlbum.js plugin does for facebook Albums.

http://zach.lysobey.com/files/gpAlbum/

There are a couple options that don’t yet work, but otherwise it should work the same as fbAlbum. Just view the source in the demo for basic usage. With a google+ gallery apparently you need your user ID & album ID.

I spent quite a long time trying to find a decent example g+ gallery. I eventually gave up and used Justin Beieber lol. If you have another good album for demo purposes, lemme know hahah.

Anyway, to find the user/album ID, first navigate to the gallery and look at the url:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/104983235121093548580/albums/5747539105984376401

in this example, the first long number (104…) is the user ID and the 2nd is the albumID (5747…)

Changed my theme

Hey Folks;

Just got rid of my old custom theme here. It was slow, and the design was honestly starting to piss me off. I just reverted to WP’s default twenty-twelve theme.

Now. I imagine there will be some problems with layout etc.. I can already tell comments look a bit wonky; but at least I don’t have to wait 5+ seconds for my custom fonts to load anymore ;-).  I’ll give this site the update it deserves at some point in the hopefully not-so-distant future.