Something like a month ago read that this year Standford University Professors behind their AI introduction course are planing to run a free online version  with video lectures, quizzes, homeworks and exam. As of today registration to this course is open. I am in. Are you?

Over last months of 2010 I was coming to realization that I want to be able not only to make multimedia Flash apps in web but also build HTML pages and services around them. So decided to start slowly learning some. Also with HTML5 making core web stack more and more potent it would make me more prepared for challenges where HTML5 will be a better choice then Flash for rich internet applications.

Not that I don’t know or did not know some. I have basic knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL. Kind of standard stack used today for various cases. But here my knowledge is gather from various small cases and web examples. Probably only part of it where I did get some formal education is relational data bases. What I wanted was to broaden my knowledge in all this.

Asking friends for ideas about good books to start from I was often asked “why books?”. Today you can learn anything from the web, thousands of examples, tutorials and documentation sites and active developer communities allow anyone to learn to program anything.

Thing is that I find it to be a bad way to start. Tutorials and examples often concentrate on solving something specific, are not always made with big picture in mind or sometimes even made badly and teach you bad things. I prefer to start from some book that give a broad and not deep view, showing how it is meant to be done without going too deep in to the details(details I will dig out later if I will need). I need this to get some ground under my feet from where I can start. And then explore the web myself knowing for what to look, what’s good and what’s not so good etc etc.

For starters I picked a little bit unusual direction As I mentioned I more or less know PHP and I wanted to try something new. Also for some time I was curious about Google App Engine. Pocking around GAE I found that probably best languages for that platform right now are Python and Java. Well I knew Java years back and don’t want to return. So I went in direction of Python.

In last December I was ordering some books from Amazon and ended up ordering 3 books on web technologies.

Google App Engine

First book from those I started to read was specifically about Google App Engine. This book covers whole GAE platform as far as I can tell. On programming part it includes both Python and Java specifics, classes and code examples. It helps you trough your first Google App Engine application. Big part of it is Data Store. Then it comes trough various other features of GAE like memory cache, google account integration apis, various other built in apis.

For me most interesting part was Data Store. I am pretty familiar with relational databases and ideas behind them and was always curious what Data Store is, how it works, where better to use it and this books gives pretty good overview on that side. Actually something like 1/3 of this book is about Data Store related stuff.

Some interesting things about App Engine. It was designed with “return answer as fast as possible”  ideology for rich web apps. One related to that interesting feature is that app can return result first and then start working on updating data, indexes etc. I guess that possible to do with any stack but I never looked on it from that optimization point.

As far as Data Store goes it reminds me of simple Object Orientated Database. It basically stores entities by unique keys that may have properties and something like classes forced by code. Also Data Store allows building indexes to run queries on some of the property types. As far as I can say there are 3 significant differences from SQL database:

• Query language is simple, does not allow joins and some types of queries that need calculations
• You can retrieve entities not trough queries but directly if you know their unique keys, it is lot faster then trough query
• It is possible to store an array as entity property, it also allows running queries that target content of arrays so you can get entities who have some kind of values in their array typed property, you can store keys in such array making kind of Object Orientated version of one to many relationship between entities

Another thing is that keys are constructed in a way where first part of key is application ID, and you don’t even see it, which means that each app can only get access  to entities it has created. Can’t access other apps data directly. Also there are limitations on how many entities you can access at once which along with other GQL limitations makes GAE a bad platform for solutions that for example need t work with large amount of data providing statistical info on it.

I guess that would be it on that book. Overall it gives good overview for GAE providing a good start point if you want to know what GAE can and can not do.

CSS Mastery

Another topic I was curious about but never was really getting to know it better was CSS.

Basically its something I knew what it was for but did not knew general ideas behind it and how it is really meant to be used. This book claims to be a book for those who have been using CSS for some time but don’t feel they are experts yet. Or people with basic knowledge of CSS. After reading this book I must say that its rather a book for starters. It rather teaches clean and simple CSS/HTML showing where common pitfalls are and all.

This books covers essential parts of CSS, selectors, techniques of layout, advanced CSS3 features and how to do something like that in CSS2.1 using old methods and tricks.

I think best part of this books is that it teaches how it should be done and why. Why HTML part of pages should be designed as meaning and structure while all styling should go in to CSS. Author adds small examples from his experience which make it pretty clear why it should be like that.  Or another thing is how using hacking to fix problems is a bad idea as problems are fixed as browsers are updated. So your hacky fix now becomes a bug.

Some 7 years ago coming from Java/C/Pascal background I started to dig in to HTML/CSS/JS and Flash. Flash slowly win me over. It was a way to develop Apps while HTML seemed like way to developer styled text pages along with a bonus of serious cross browser inconsistencies/bugs and limitations. Over these 7 years things seemed to improve especially on JS/CSS front.

Sadly coming from Flash I still find that even CSS3 is insufficient to style things cleanly. Firstly today style is not only about static visuals. Its about animations, reaction to user actions, its about visual behavior of interfaces. Now CSS3 includes animations but that’s not enough. I think big problem is  that you can’t reference values in CSS. For example one of examples in the book shows how to make 3 text columns to be of one dynamic height. Thing is that you can have them aether of static height or they all will scale according to size of text inside them. As you can’t reference values in CSS what author proposes is to make all columns of large height, then use container of those columns in “hakcy” way which resizes according its content actual size. Now container is of size of highest column. And now use overflow property to cut out unnecessary height of columns. Of course such trick is possible only with simple column style. Now then all I wanted is to make 3 columns to share same dynamic size. And I end up with doing lot of trickery to get a limited solution. This kind of lets me down…

Another example is vertical content centering on page. Solution looks pretty clear but is limited too. Just make your content top padding 50% which will move its top side to center of page. And then, with different technique, move content up by half of its height. Yay it is centered. Sounds even intuitive and logical in idea. But you can’t target values in CSS. So you can’t target its own height in position style. So you can’t center object vertically if it has dynamic size in HTML/CSS… Or at least it seems so.

Well anyways this all is CSS problems. This books does good work communicating good and correct way of dividing content and style of your HTML/CSS pages. I guess many HTML/CSS problems can be solved with JSS/jQuery filling in position of visual and other behavior for HTML/JS/CSS at least for now.

Python Web Development with Django

Another book I only just started to read is this one. I thought that it is a good idea to learn not PHP/Python language directly for web development(as that I can do myself). What I wanted to learn is how to develop good web solutions too. How to architect your engine, authentication, user content, HTML output components etc. I wanted to know best practices in how to develop your engine/framework for web site building. And what’s a better way then learning some framework and seeing how they done things there.

Another thing with Python books is that Python is a language used for broad number of things. While PHP is mostly used for web development Python started elsewhere as general purpose language like C. As a result majority of books don’t cover Python use as web development language almost at all. And thus majority of those books are of no interest for me in current situation. For that reason picking Python based web development framework book seemed like a good idea too.

Now first chapters of this book gives incremental introduction to Python first which is perfect I knew for a while that Python used spaces and new lines as part of its syntax instead of various braces. I always was finding that it is both good and bad. Good that everyone writes in same style as it is enforced trough syntax, also makes language less bloated with special symbols and more readable. Sadly in some cases it also makes language less readable as you can’t arbitrary style some part of code for better readability.

I just only started this book but so far I must say I really like some features of Python. They make language a lot smaller when performing task with array for example. Here are few interesting examples:

• string[1] – like in any other language it returns strings second character
• string[-1] – here good things start, it returns strings last character, so if index in [] is less then 0 array length is added
• string[:1] – now what? Turns out that Python extended this operator to allow ranges. In this case it will return first two characters of this string.
• string[1:3] – now this is full syntax returning second, third and fourth symbols in the string.
• string[1:] – and this will return whole string without first character

Anyways I have still much to read from this one so no more comments on it so far.

Other books and some practice

Basically this is it from this book order but there are two more I would like to buy. One on JavaScript/jQuery and one on some PHP framework to improve my knowledge in those directions. Also I have few test projects planed to try and use these technologies. After reading book on CSS I already updated homepage a little(here how it looked before), planing to do more work later on it. Also planing to try and do two projects for practice on GAE later.

Today saw this talk at TED.com , it is called “Why work does not happen at work”

Hierarchy as solution to organizational problems

Basically it is critics on old and modern way of organization. Thing is that when someone works alone or in group from 2 to 5 they can manage to organize themselves more or less. But as number of people working in collaboration raises costs of managing collaboration raise too. I guess all of us know how it works… We need to start to manage our work, break it to smaller peaces, assign those puzzle parts to different workers, someone then should work bringing parts together and checking everything etc etc.

And we know how for last century various organization coped with it. Though basic ideas probably go far back be it Rome legions or other large collaborations. We humans start to make a hierarchy of management. Like there is Cesar who has legats, who have tribunes prefects etc etc. So we have small group that has manager, then there is manager higher that manages lower level managers etc etc. This kind of hierarchy allows to minimize organizational costs and inefficiencies, but not to remove them completely, and even add new organizational costs and inefficiencies like bureaucracy.

Here comes everybody

Few months ago I ordered some books from Amazon.com and wanted to cover them as I read them. But I was kind of slow with it Now I find this post cover things that intersect with one of them so it is a good time to mention it

This book by Clay Shirky covers a similar theme. Mostly it speaks about various sites, tools and phenomena where internet and tools built on it helped people to organize in situation it was not possible to organize before. Why? Because before organizing people on large scale in such cases without some management and organization was not possible while costs of management and organization were making such cases not  worthy to pursue.

Today with tools like flicker, tweeter, Wikipedia hurdles and price of large scale organization fall bringing new unexpected work models, content and media productions and various other human self organization without the organization. It is especial interesting in some cases where corporations, organizations or governments used this limitation before but now find themselves pressured but self organizing groups of shared interests.

Anyways I recommend this book to everyone who  is interested in such things. It will not teach you where and how to use aether hierarchical management or web tools to organize things but it will give and overview to how things start to change for some of the cases.

Why work does not happen at work

Back to ted video. In it Jason Fried tries to argue that hierarchical management is a wrong way to go. That costs we pay for organizing in such way often make things worse then better. We spend more time and resources on management levels, on communication with manager and planing, on various meetings and bureaucracy.

He mentions various things that you may notice yourself a lot in your work if you are working on large projects where people need to collaborate. People disturb you a lot, you take time to remember and concentrate at task again, at the end of the day you hardly remember what you did and probably feel you did not do much. As a result some people prefer to get to work early or late to have at least few hours when not one is there to disturb. Or some work on a go. Jason for examples mentions that office is not most popular place where work is done for many today(which I find hard to believe, guess he asks his freelancing clients which makes it biased) . He also seems to dislike managers and meetings saying that managers job is to disturb others from doing their work or that meetings talk about work and do not help at all on doing that work, just waste of time… He proposes things like ditching meetings if you can to see that you would do more work, not less. Or also proposing things like 4 hours of not talking and disturbing in other ways. Seem like ignorant and one sided stance, or probably just provocative unless he knows something we do not. That makes me curios to read book his company promote in the blog to see if there is something useful there.

Why we do not have a choice sometimes

Sadly I can’t agree with his stance. I wish I could but I can’t. Yes there are cases where using modern tools leads to job being done without much of management and organization. But there are not many cases  when people can work for such periods of time without need to synchronize their efforts with others. It would work for stable, predictable work where aims and goals of workers are more or less stable and everyone knows what and how to do. So everyone can sit down and work on it without bothering each other.

Now in my line of work there are many different elements that are made by different people that should work tightly together. Also aims are not stable and problems are solved as they are encountered. This is bad but some works are like that. Things change in outside environment weekly if not daily and you need to respond to changes quickly to get bigger benefits + there are tight deadlines sometimes that do not depend on you. You do not meet them? Then you did not did the job.

I guess you would like to know about examples. Well first that comes to my mind is that we for example have few different projects some of which use different librraries and code bases. But we make similarity products. Now worker from project A does something that was previously done in project B but same code base could not be used. By Jason idea person from project A does all the job himself from scratch probably using other code base as example. Worse case? He does all mistakes that were done in project B all over again spending time and resources or interprets some things in B code base differently and gets even new problems… In reality some workers from A and B will need at least disturb each other and at max do some meetings to discuss things. Honestly it seems to me that ditching meetings and not talking for 4 hours would make more bad then good here.

Then even if we take people in same project. Say server programmer and client programmer. Imagine both not talking for 4 hours… Result would be disaster… Each would build his own things without synchronizing with others efforts…

Or example of disastrous deadlines are seasons and celebrations. What’s point of releasing Christmas cookies after Christmas? Time have passed and release doe not make sense anymore. You were late. Well in my line of work we need to prepare content for various celebrations and events and not meeting those deadlines means we missed a revenue and clients.

Conclusions

I find it hard to buy Jason ideas from the start cuz I do not see them working i enviroment I work now. I hope it was possible but it would need some magical tools that would still take time to use and be similar disturbing. Problem is not management and disturbing but works that need people to collaborate often and synchronize their efforts. Clay in his book mentions that mangers hierarchies will not go the way of dinosaurs because there are new and old things that get transformed because of internet and tools. But there are things for which this would not work… But honestly I would have preferred to work ona kind of work where you are payed for amount of things done and can worker whenever and you want and in a way you want.

Also I find it interesting to check their books to see if there are some ideas I could use.

Well 4 days ago I took this book from work to read. I picked a little at it during the week and found it and interesting read and only ~260 pages long which means I will be trough with in 1-2 weeks.

What is it about?

Basically it covers stories of how many start-ups started, grew and aether crumbled or set upon a pedestal from which it would be hard to push them . Mostly they are about internet as its a place where viral marketing is at its best but they also cover cases like Tuppleware or Ponzi scheme. But mostly they are about internet starting at story of Hot or Not, telling story of Mosaic/Netscape/IE and a guy who in a way was behind all of them (to my shame I did not know that). Basically those all are stories of internet start-ups that grew exponentially almost out of nothing in such short periods of time that it could seem ridiculous and unreal for people of age before internet.

Why you may find it interesting?

Well as mentioned above this book is about stories of successful exponential growth that mentions how it was achieved and what are the common pitfalls.  Basically it is like a two sided sword that cuts in both directions. From one side you should make an interesting product(cheap and “want”) and give means and motivation for people to spread a word + be cheap and efficient on all the steps + being prepared to scale when exponential growth starts to kick in. Bad product will not be able to even start no meter how much advertisement money you pour in it, making it hard to spread will lower it’s virality and being not prepared for scaling you risk to fall under your own weight. But in internet with right idea today it is easier then ever before. All you need is an idea everyone will understand and want quickly + right tools or platform with viral channels and agile scaling on demand.

So if you are in any way interested in bringing webs attention to something be it some product, idea or tool go and find a way to get your hands on it. It will be worth it at least as a food for thoughts and source of motivation.