Tom Drapeau

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 for work that demanded me to jump into CSS, so I purchased this O’Reilly title. I am a huge fan of O’Reilly work… my bookshelves are sagging with O’Reilly titles. I didn’t really have the time to sit back and savor this read, as my work demanded I just gulp it down.

I have to say, I sincerely enjoyed this gulp. Eric Meyer is a web standards guru, and really, really understands CSS to its core. I fully admit my geekness and say that anyone who can break down a technology the way Eric did for CSS can hold my attention for 450 pages, no problem.

I did come away with a healthy appreciation for how complex good CSS can be for a sophisticated web site that is expected to work across all mainstream web browsers. With the guide, though, I came away with the tools to manage it.

I highly recommend this book to any programmer looking to create good looking websites.

tdrapeau Books Book Review, Books, CSS, eric meyer, OReilly

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 v2.5 was not yet released when I went shopping for a book on Python.

Anyway, I read this book from the perspective of a veteran programmer, having previously worked in COBOL, C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP and .NET technologies such as C# and ASP.NET. I was interested in an in-depth look at Python, a language I had tinkered with for a single work project before but really had not mastered.
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tdrapeau Books Book Review, Books, OReilly, Programming Languages, Python

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 the Carnegie Mellon School of Design, amongst other achievements. Fry stresses the 7 stages of visualizing data:

Acquire -> Parse -> Filter -> Mine -> Represent -> Refine -> Interact

He spends a significant amount of time talking about how each individual data set you might encounter and need to visualize is inherently different than others, or needs to be seen that way in order to grok something truly interesting out of it.

I found the visualizations to be on the simple side, and several chapters to be pretty much irrelevant as I have a programming background. However, I found his approach to be refreshing, really concentrating on the data at hand, and coming up with custom built visualization exercises that showed great attention to the actual data at hand.

There are definitely useful patterns here: Mapping, Time Series, Connections/Correlations, Scatterplot Maps, Trees, Hierarchies, and Recursion, Networks and Graphs. The 2 chapters on bringing in data, “Acquiring” and “Parsing”, are decent beginning points, but much more data is needed to build robust visualizations based on disparate internet data sources.

All in all, it was a good read. In today’s Web 2.0 world, a book like this brings very interesting possibilities, with the wealth of personal preference/friend/activity data available for free via the internet.

tdrapeau Books Books, Data Visualization, Graphs, Map, Networks, OReilly, Time Series, Trees