I have been programming for over a decade now, but mainly focused on back end technologies. Thus, I have never really taken the time to learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS, as it turns out, was the last core web technology in widespread use that I still had not yet learned. A project came up [...]

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The 3rd edition of Learning Python, by Mark Lutz, covers the Python programming language as of Python v2.5. With O’Reilly books, the Learning series is generally less sophisticated than the Programming series (ex/ Learning Perl is easier than Programming Perl). I would normally get the Programming version, but I think the Programming version that covered [...]

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I know, I know, *everyone* has read this book already. But I hadn’t. Now I have.
The Tipping Point is a really great book that discusses the phenomena surrounding “social epidemics”. The “Tipping Point” describes that moment in time when things coalesce and an epidemic begins. The book talks of the “Law of the [...]

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Visualizing Data explores data visualizations through the Processing Environment, a Java-based IDE used as a sort of visual sketchpad to plot out visualizations without heaps of Java code. The author, Ben Fry, is well schooled - PhD from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, the 2006-2007 Nierenberg Chair of Design for [...]

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In 1998, John [Wood] took a vacation that changed his life. Trekking through a remote Himalayan village, he struck up conversation with a schoolteacher, who invited John to visit his school. There, John discovered that the few books available were so precious that they were kept under lock and key - to protect them from [...]

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I know, I know, everyone has read this book already. I’m still going to write about it.
The Wisdom of Crowds takes a scientific look at the theory that given the right composition and the right problems to solve, a group can collectively be smarter than its smartest member. It sounds like it can’t [...]

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Who Let The Blogs Out?, by Biz Stone, is a great introduction to the world of blogs and blogging. It starts off a little slow with a broad background into blogs and blog networks, it picks up with a lot of practical information about blogging. How to use HTML/CSS to style your blog, how to [...]

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I just finished reading Wil Wheaton’s third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m no book reviewer, but I found so many parallels between Wil’s stories and my young life, growing up in the late 70’s / early 80’s in Westwood and Ayer, Massachusetts.
Full disclosure: I was not a [...]

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Founders at Work is a collection of 32 interviews done by Jessica Livingston of founders of tech companies. Many of the big names are present: Apple, Adobe, Yahoo, etc. A bunch of people have reviewed this book already, including those who are interviewed for the book, so I thought I would give my personal favorite [...]

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I just finished reading this great memoir written by James Marcus, which details the 5 years he spent working for Amazon.com from 1996-2001. The book is a great read, as James clearly knows many more words than I do, and uses them all cleverly to describe the sights, sounds and spirit of early Amazon. From [...]

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