In this (really!) short book, Alistair Croll presents you several tips on how to improve your chances of becoming a good professional speaker. Alistair starts by introducing the conference industry world. Having an idea about how it works is important for understanding the risks and obstacles you might face. After this introduction, you’ll see how you can adapt an idea to a specific type of event. As you’ll find out (if you read the book), having a good idea is not enough for making into the conference as a presenter. You’ll probably need to have one or two good topics, write a good CFP about it and, if you get picked, you’ll probably need to adapt it to the available sessions/slots.

Chapter 3 is a great one because it will present several tips that will help you get chosen from the available candidates. It also presents several things which will probably hurt you during the process, so you should really pay attention to this chapter. The last two chapters give you some tips on how to improve your presentations and on how you can improve your chances of making money at these conferences.

Typically, this is not the sort of book I read. However, I was looking for something to give me some tips on this subject (conferences) and this book was really what I needed to get an overall look on the topic. Overall, I’m giving it a 7/10.

Nowadays, there are no doubts about the role UX plays in getting a great product. Unfortunately, UX is generally associated with costly processes which involve lots of design. In this book, Laura Klein does an excellent job in showing you how to apply several techniques in  order to reduce the time and money which is typically spent in this area.

Even though the book has UX in its title, the truth is that book concentrates on showing you several techniques that will help you continuously test the user experience. No, I’m not talking about color use or stuff like that. I’m talking about techniques which will help you validate if the problem you’re trying to solve deserves to be solved (ie, should you be wasting your time and money building this product) or that will improve the way you run your qualitative and quantitative research and testing. In other words, Laura introduces several approaches which will help you apply lean principles to UX design.

Looking at its title (UX for Lean Startups) might mislead you into thinking that this book is for someone who wants to create a startup. In my opinion, it’s not. In fact, I’d say that given the importance that UX plays in software, the book’s title should be something like UX for Lean Developers. But hey, that’s just me

Overall, I’m giving it a 8/10.

Yesterday I’ve finally finished reading Jeffrey Richter’s last book CLR via C#, 4th edition. I’ve been getting a copy of this book (buying or being lucky enough to get a review copy) since it was called Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming. Each new edition ends up adding new cool stuff and this last edition didn’t disappoint. Besides Garbage Collector chapter rewrite, this latest edition introduces the new Reflection API (introduced by .NET 4.5)  and presents several new concepts associated with the new WinRT framework. If you’re a die hard C# programmer, you should be pleased to know that the book has been updated to illustrate the new C# 5.0 async features introduced by the latest .NET framework release.

So, this is really a book I love and fortunately for us developers, Jeffrey has been doing an excellent job of maintaining and updating it during these last years. In my opinion, this is still the .NET reference book every developer should buy and read. My score: 10/10.

In these last couple of days, I’ve spent most of my free time reading this book. It’s a really thick book (I must confess that is was way more thicker than I was expecting initially). It does cover a lot of ground and it’s probably the best reference on the subject available on print. It’s a little dense and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who is just starting doing web development. Even though it covers several topics in depth, I must say that chapter 7 is really a must for anyone interested in understanding how links are used for ranking pages.

Even though the book has lots of examples (I think it would be better to reduce them, specially the ones presented in the first chapters), this isn’t a platform specific book. In other words, don’t expect to get instructions on how to perform a specific task for server A or platform B. Instead, expect to find lots of examples that can be used across all platforms. Overall, I liked the book and that’s why I’m giving it an 8/10.

ls j:\ | foreach { 
  $itemName = $_.Name.Replace('.', ' ') 
  $destination = ls | where { $itemName -match $_.Name } | select -First 1 
  if( $destination -ne $null){       
   mi $_.PSPath $destination.PSPath -Verbose -WhatIf  
  } 
}

After some time where everything seemed to be running ok, I’ve noticed that some of the files weren’t being copied. After further analysis, I’ve noted that files contained the [ and ] chars weren’t being copied. Fortunately, we have StackOverflow and I’ve ended posting my question over there. One of the answers suggested to use the –LiteralPath parameter for the move-item cmdlet. According to the docs, the –LiteralPath parameter :

Specifies the path to the current location of the items. Unlike Path, the value of LiteralPath is used exactly as it is typed. No characters are interpreted as wildcards. If the path includes escape characters, enclose it in single quotation marks. Single quotation marks tell Windows PowerShell not to interpret any characters as escape sequences.

Did you notice the wildcards part? Yep, wildcards…unfortunately form me, I had completely forgotten that [] define wildcards which match a range of characters (note to self: do read the PowerShell docs). For instance, and this is just copied from the docs, here’s a quick example:

[a-l]ook matches book, cook or look, but not took.

Aha! ok, now it makes sense…that’s why those files which contained the [ ] on its name weren’t being copied. PowerShell was translating the values defined within [ ]  into ranges. Another note to self: don’t forget about wildcards when you’re writing PowerShell scripts.

And that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more.

In order to illustrate this approach, we’ll rewrite the previous example. We’ll remove the jQuery dependency and will change the code so that each file defines  a single printValue (file 2 overrides and augments this method). The following snippet shows the code I’ve ended writing in each file (assume we’re using strict mode and that file 1 is loaded before file 2):

If you compare this code with the one we had before, you’ll notice several differences. The most interesting part happens within the anonymous function defined in file2. As you can see, I start by saving a reference to the printValue method which was defined by the module introduced by file1. This reference is used by another function which will end up overriding the initial printValue method. Without this reference, it would be impossible to call the function after performing the override. From now on, you can simply call the overridden function like this (assuming we’ve got an element with ID set to info):

And that’s it for now. Stay tuned for more.

Before going on, I must confess that splitting modules across different files isn’t really something I love. Whenever I’m facing this decision, I always try to re-check my code and see if I can refactor it so that a module is defined in a single file. There are, however, some cases where that isn’t possible and in those cases we need strategies like augmentation. The best way to illustrate it is to show an example. We’ll augment the module introduced in the previous post by adding a new method. Here’s one way to do it (notice that this code should be placed into a different JavaScript file):

Notice that this second anonymous function receives a reference to the original module which is being augmented (besides the jQuery global reference). There’s a slight gotcha with the previous code: you need to preserve the correct order when importing the files of the module. In the previous sample, that is not needed because none of the files uses properties defined in the other module, so we should do everything in our power to remove that dependency. Fortunately for us, we can remove that restriction by slightly changing the code:

According to the standard, the operator || will return the first expression when it’s convertible to true. If that isn’t possible, then it will return the second expression. In my example, we can use an empty object ({}) to ensure that we’re always working with a valid object within the anonymous functions that define the module. Since there is no dependency between the files, then this is more than enough for removing the order dependency introduced by our first snippet.

Even though the previous snippet allows one method to call another (ie, if, for instance, we need to call printValue from within printAnotherValue at runtime, then we should be fine), if we need to access  properties in order to override them, then we’re out of luck . In these cases, we need to change the and there’s no way to escape the need to preserve the loading order. That will be the topic for another post. Stay tuned for more.

Now, if you’ve been doing JS for some time, you’ve probably noticed something which might get you worried: we’re depending on a global. Technically, $ is an alias to the jQuery global object. In other words, were depending on an implied global and whenever the JS interpreter engine finds one, it’ll have to walk the scope chain backwards until it finds a valid reference (in our example, it’ll walk until it gets to the global scope). Now, in our case, we’d end with an error if jQuery hasn’t been imported before our script gets run. Things could be worse though. For instance, suppose we were using the implied global in the left sign of an assignment expression. In that case, if the global didn’t exist, we’d end up creating a new one (if we were not running in strict mode).

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution for this kind of problem: I’m talking about global imports. Whenever you need a reference to a global variable within the closure created by the anonymous function, you just pass it as a parameter. The next snippet shows this strategy in action:

Even though we’re still using the $ alias, this time it refers to the local parameter defined by the anonymous function which is initialized with a reference to the jQuery global variable. With this strategy, we’ve ended with better code which is also faster.

Now that we already have gone through the basics, we’re ready to take a look at some more advanced scenarios. Stay tuned for more.