Effective Java (by Joshua Block, from Sun Developer Network), is a wonderful book that offers me hope for the new Software Engineers out there. It’s not just about writing high-performance software, but understanding the side effects and costs of skinning the cat one way instead of another. It’s a compendium of “issues” one faces while architecting or writing software, and best practices on how to face them. The concept of such a book comes from Scott Meyers’ book, Effective C++.
Read on…
From Digg:
Sept. 19, 1982: Can’t You Take a Joke? 
wired.com — With a short post to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University, on September 19, 1982 at 11:44 AM, Scott Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon.
Oh, and to piggyback on this meme, I recently discovered this program that will let you draw pictures in ASCII art. You use it like a regular drawing program, except it draws with ASCII characters, and can save the pictures as text files.
This page has been up and down a bit (They got listed on Digg), but some guy created a huge portrait of Obama out of Legos. Please do read the comments, as that’s where the fun begins on this page.
Enjoy!
Joel Spolsky, of the brilliant blog Joel On Software (and some other folks) just launched a brand new forum website for software developers to help each other with programming questions called Stack Overflow (still in beta). Read on…
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability is a book by Steve Krug about some high-level concepts on website design that take real-world users into account. I ordered this book, but I haven’t read it yet. The reviews on Amazon are very favorable, but I initially heard about this book on a tutorial on using AJAX in WordPress for interactive forms.
I really have high hopes for this book, because I like my tech guides with a heavy dose of reality. I’ll let you know when I start digging into it.
Yekmer’s blog contains this post with a comparison of java web frameworks from the perspective of someone who really wants to do something useful with it.
For him, Wicket won.