Reading List

This weeks reading list is a good one. Actually … I’ve been working on these three for a while now. Where to start?

Mastering Regular Expressions is a fantastic book. I read 5 or 10 pages in the morning and work through some variations of the examples during the day. At night I try to read another 5 or 10 pages. It’s taking a while, but it seams to stick better when I work it in small sessions. Regex does some amazing things. I wish I had known about it 5 years ago.

Mastering Data Warehouse Aggregates is just plain cool. I’ve been working with databases for about 10 years now, but I’ve focused mainly on production (transactional) databases. Now I’m working in more of a data warehouse environment and I’m learning that a lot of the rules are different. I’ve sort of blindly worked my way towards some of the methods described in this book on a project or two, but I had no idea that there was a ‘right way’ to handle the ‘unique’ problems you run into in data warehouse environments. It’s not as much of a cookbook as a lot of what I read. It’s more of a ‘this is why this is a smart approach and these are some of the things you can do to make it work’ type book. Very thought provoking stuff.

Coding Techniques for Microsoft Visual Basic.Net is a fun read. It was written against a pre-release beta of Visual Basic.net (I think) so some of it is starting to show its age, but so far every example I’ve tried has worked just fine for me. I like this book for its style. John Connell does a great job of describing the why BEFORE he gets into the how. I really like that. He takes his time and he chose some really interesting challenges to write code samples for. It’s a lot easier reading the code when you’re interested in the problem it’s designed to solve. It’s like solving a puzzle. I’ve read most of this book at night when I’ve been away from a computer so I haven’t played with the code in this one as much as I’d like. My plan is to finish reading it all the way through and then go back and work through some of the chapters again when I can mess around with the code a little.

Ok … so that’s what I’m working on at the moment. I hope to have a more detailed write up of each of these books online as I finish them.

Overwhelmed:

I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately. I realized a while back that in order to grow at work and continue to enjoy my work I needed to take my .net skills to the next level. With that in mind I’ve been putting in a lot of hours reading and practicing new skills. I have a sort of list of skills I’ve been working on the last 6 or 8 months.

Basically it breaks down like this …

Core skills:

• vb.net
  • winforms
  • ado.net

• sql
  • t-sql and query optimization
  • ssis
  • reporting services
• regex

Alternate skills:

• Ruby

• Java
• Web
  • html
  • css
  • ado.net

Man … jumping around on the list above for the last 6 months has completely kicked my ass. Tonight I sat down and looked at this list and what I’ve been doing and realized I’ve been just way to much all over the place on my study choices. Java one night, Ruby the next. vb.net, ado.net, regex … all in one day. What the hell was I thinking??? From here on out I’m going to try to focus on the 3 core skills and only visit the alternate skills if I need them for specific projects or when I feel like I’m getting on top of a core skill.

My primary goal is to study vb.net (mostly winforms and oop) 75% of the time. the other 25% I plan on looking at SQL or regex to give myself a break from reading .net code. I’ve found that breaking out to look at something different once or twice a week helps me focus the other nights when I’m reading vb.

Another thing that is working well for me is ordering books from Amazon. Every payday (every two weeks) I order at least one (used) book from my wish list. Every week I take 20 or 30 minutes to browse around and try to add one or two books to my list. This week I ordered two books. I’ll talk more about the books I’ve ordered or plan to order in another post.

Some tips from the Wonky Traveler:

How to survive a business trip.

1. Passing through security at DFW airport with an expired drivers license is not fun. They have no sense of humor. None.
2. If you notice the pilot is practicing his ‘flying around in circles’ maneuver for more than 45 minutes don’t worry, you’ve already missed your connecting flight. Your screwed.
3. There is no fun way to kill 6 hours in an airport without getting drunk or arrested. I did neither.
4. If the Asian kid next to you falls asleep on your shoulder it’s OK. At least it’s better than the homeless guy with the crazy eyes that sat there gulping Starbucks and chewing his nails through the ENTIRE flight from Dallas to Chicago.
5. If the pilot says they want to ‘reboot’ the airplane by completely powering it off, waiting 5 minutes and then restarting everything, your screwed.
6. If you land in the middle of a ’severe thunderstorm’ you’re better off just getting soaked on the way to the rental car than trying to sit it out. At this point it’s clear that someone has it in for you. Accept it and move on.

Semantic xHtml

In a recent post I spoke of my need to ‘prime the pump’. Well … it’s primed! I’ve been neck deep in world of xHtml and css for the last week and I’m loving it. I still haven’t gotten to the ‘I Rock’ threshold, but I feel I’m well past the ‘I suck’ stage. Today I heard Molly on a BoagWorld podcast (Podcast 65 I think) and I decided to check her site out. It’s really nice. I found lot’s of great content, but the first thing that caught my eye was this essay about semantic xHtml. I’ve heard talk of semantic coding, but to this point I haven’t had the time or the background to really grok it. Molly’s writing really made it clear to me why this subject has been so popular lately. As I understand it , semantic xHTML is the idea that xHtml markup should be used to represent content and not presentation. One of the examples I’ve seen a lot is not using the <p> element to generate space. That’s really the job of css. This is so basic and core to what I’ve been learning about (thanks to Head First Html, xHtml and css ) that I thought it was just the way everyone does it. I guess that’s one advantage of being a newcomer. I didn’t have to suffer through the bad old days when the only way to get the job done was to hack around the intent Html.

I’ll be traveling with work next week and I’m thinking of trying to do some sort of full blown web page to test out some of this book learnin’ I’ve been getting lately. I’m thinking of making a page with a table of links to some of the developer user groups I think are interesting in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but I’m hoping to spiff it up a bit with my new css skills.

Lucky day!

It’s like finding folding money in the pocket of the pants you just took out of the dryer. Like when you put on your coat from last winter and find those keys you’ve been looking for forever. It’s your lucky day. That’s how I felt last night when I found this little gem. A text editor? Oh brother … this is the one I’ve been looking for. I live in SQL and VB all day, but the one constant in every system I use is a good text editor. I love having a tabbed interface I can drop all sorts of notes , code snips, whatever into. this one is cool because it’s smart. When I click on tim.cost it starts by selecting just part of the string and not the whole damn thing. I wish notepad did this. It does syntax highlighting and it has collapsible ranges (just like my beloved visual studio). The icons are smooth and professional looking. The default font is easy to look at and the line highlighting is subtle, but helpful. Very nice. The tabs are easy to open, close, bulk close, bulk save, bulk search and replace. This thing just rocks. I think the coolest part is that it can run from a USB stick. I’ve used other text editors that do some of these things, but this one blows the others away. I’ve been thinking of putting together a toolbox of stuff like this that I could have handy at all times. This is just the thing to get that project started. NotePad++

HTML wind sprints …

In my last post I admitted that I suck at web stuff. Wow … that little revelation really got me thinking. Once upon a time I was OK at web stuff. In the dark days before .net I was able to cobble together a basic web page, even a little classic asp. But now I’d be lost even trying to do that stuff. So yesterday I set out for nerdbooks and picked up a copy of “Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML“. It’s my third head first book. I’m also reading Head first Java and Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design. Anyway … it’s one hell of a book. I’m tearing through it at a startling rate and feel like I’m developing a stronger grasp of HTML than ever before. Not only that, but I’m finally starting to grok CSS. Wow. At the risk of seaming like a total noobie, it’s about the coolest stuff ever.

As I was sort of stalling in my study of .net I thought it might be good for me to change gears a little bit. I hope switching to HTML for a while will sort of prime the pump and put me back on track with my pursuit of c#. At any rate … it can’t hurt. I’ve been planning on putting a Fort Worth web dev and design user group on my calendar, maybe I should make room for the Dallas ASP.net group as well.

p.s. I’m still working through the Boag podcasts. I’ve listened to all of the archives at .Net Magazine , now I’m working through the ones at Boagworld.com. Really great stuff.

Branching Out.

I’ve been listening to the Britishy web dev wisdom of Paul Boag all day. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a web guy. I can surf all day, but aside from this wyswyg blog writing I suck at web stuff. Today anyway. And so I listen to those who know. That brings me back round to BoagWorld. He’s got a really cool blog, but it’s his podcast that really rocks. I’ve tried other techy podcasts but there is usually this sort of geeky superiority in them that kind of turns me off. Boag is easy to listen to. I listened to about 5 hours of his podcast today (while I pound out sql like a good code monkey). So far everything he’s said applies equally to the non-web stuff as to the css/html’ish stuff.

My favorite bits so far …

1. He’s passionate about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”

2. He argues for white space in web design. I’ve always sort of instinctively felt that white space was important. He does a good job of summing up the best argument for it.

3. He laughs like a little girl at his own jokes. (this is also the number one reason I would never do a podcast … I’m a total goob when I start giggling like that.) www.boagworld.com

Update: 05/30/07 I’ve listened to way more than 5 hours of the BoagWorld podcast now. I think it’s fantastic! You should definately check it out.

High quality death march

A friend sent this link to a great blog “Andres’ thoughts”… right there in the first paragraph it just jumps right off the page … “The team consists of really smart developers, but over time, stress and too little focus on quality have seriously hurt their code base. Today, they are struggling to deliver at all.” www.taylor.se/blog/

I’ve seen this at so many jobs that it starts to feel like the struggle is the only constant. Almost everyone can see the problems, but it’s hard to break the cycle.

For another view of the same problems check out “the Angry Coder”. They break out 5 common problems to look for in small (and not so small) companies. My personal favorite is #3 “Small companies tend to solve problems from the hip … They just dive in, develop something, and modify/rewrite it as required to make it fit various clients’ needs.” www.angrycoder.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=185

Man … I’m so sick of hearing “Oh it’s no big deal, we’ll just make a copy of X and add in a little Y …”. It never works that way! You always end up going the long way around before you realize that your working on a totally different set of problems. I’m all for reusing stuff, but not before you think it through.

Update: The caption on the Quality poster reads “The race for Quality has no finish line – so techinally it’s more of a death march”. Aint that the damned truth! This and other bitter little nuggets can be found at the brilliant www.despair.com