sergiosantos.info, blog and works

sergiosantos.info

blog and works

Book: The Ruby Programming Language

28.Jun.2009

The Ruby Programming Language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto

Taking advantage of the recent free time, I was able to finish reading the other book I’ve bought at Sapo Codebits (the first was The Myths Of Innovation). The Ruby Programming Language is like one of those reference books, taking you through an overview of all the language features. I had already a good knowledge of the essential aspects of Ruby, but I wanted to have a full view of all it can really do.

The book was written by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto and has what you should expect, especially when the creator of a language is one of the authors (Matz, as he is commonly known). It covers methodically each feature, even some relatively unknown like fibers and some hooks. It’s not as boring as it may sound, since the concepts are well spread across all the book, and ruby code is of fairly light reading.

I enjoyed most the functional and metaprogramming chapters. They give a good insight on all the coding possibilities. A special note to the always great why comics that illustrate each chapter cover.

It’s a good book for anyone trying to gain a big knowledge of the programming language. Not one to be read from cover to cover, but to be picked up occasional and dive in a particular topic.

The complete list of reviewed books.

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books, programming, ruby

Book: Tribes

19.Jun.2009

Tribes is the latest book by the well known marketing author Seth Godin. I had already read one of his books, Small Is The New Big. However, Tribes is about leadership and communities. For the author, the world is composed of groups of people sharing a common interest, the tribes. And each of these tribes needs a leader.

The book follows the Seth Godin’s usual format. It’s a collection of small rants, examples and advices, written in an active and motivational style. More than the encouragement, it’s worth for the short stories. And the book is indeed short which it’s actually not a bad thing, since the vision it’s simple to understand.

An entertaining book with an important message.

The complete list of reviewed books.

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books, leadership, marketing

Perch - On demand CMS

06.Jun.2009

Most of the websites, specially those which represent companies or institutions have simple technology needs: just a layout/design and content that needs to be updated occasionally. The most common solutions for this are: static HTML pages (and when the client wants to change something, it calls the web developer) or a CMS (whether we’re talking about WordPress on a in-house framework).

Perch offers a solution somewhere in the middle. It creates a content management interface for a static website simply by adding a PHP tag to a block of content. Mark a text as editable, and you can start managing it at the Perch administration page. The video on their website demonstrates the process very well.

This kind of systems are specially helpful for web designers. It’s getting harder for them to keep up with all the latest programming languages and frameworks, while a platform like this fulfils the basic needs of most clients. It’s not free (£35 for each domain), but I believe many designers are willing to pay the cost for not having to worry about programming.

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tools, web apps