Wikipedia says of Assembly:

Assembly languages are a type of low-level languages for programming computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other (usually) integrated circuits.

Sweet! This book will teach me how to work with microprocessors and microcontrollers! That is what I thought, and I was close.

The Art of Assembly Language from No Starch Press covers the basics of all low level programming but has a pretty heavy slant toward intel based CPUs. With support for Linux, Mac and Windows, and even FreeBSD.

The book is big, heavy and full of knowledge. It covers the HLA (High Level Assembly) which is the best match of high level coding with low level code. The author, Randall Hyde, starts with the absolute basics explaining what each part of the controller (cpu) is and what it is meant for. He explains why things are setup the way they are and even how things have changed over the history of computing.

If you are asking yourself why you need to pick up this book, take this quick little survey:

• Have you ever wondered how a computer actually works?
• Do you ever dream in code?

If you answered yes to either of those then you probably want to go get this book right now.

The Art of Assembly really opened my eyes to what goes on in the underbelly of the computer, and I have a better understanding of why my code works now. Learning HLA has truly been an experience, and it is one I think the whole world of programmers should have.

Authored by four brilliant minds Todd Parker, Scott Jehl, Maggie Costello Wachs, and Patty Toland (also known as the Filament Group) make up a great brain trust for this title. Combined they have over 30yrs of design experience working with interactive design, and mastering the art of design for everyone.

This book is unique in that the authors seem to have really sat down and worked out a process, and this book is really a step-by-step guide and explanation of their process. It teaches you that sometimes the best practices are the best steps to take first. They explain that although it takes more time, and energy, that starting with a base HTML structure for your website is the best place to start as the most people will be able to access your site. There is no need for parsers, javascript, codecs, etc.

After getting a base for your site in HTML they explain how and why you should test what the browser in use supports. Does the browser support javascript? Does it support all of the javascript spec, or just parts? Does it support AJAX? JSON? With each test they explain why you want to test, and if the browser passes how to utilize these features.

This is NOT a code book. Their examples are purely theoretical, although some sample and code snippets are provided.

The general idea of this title is to get you thinking about the way you design your product. To make you think outside the fancy and latest jQuery features, and XML and SVG, and make sure you base product is a product that everyone can use.

Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (Book Cover)

Today I am reviewing Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time which is best summed up by the books official website on The Pragmatic Bookshelf site:

Do you ever look at the clock and wonder where the day went? You spent all this time at work and didn’t come close to getting everything done. Tomorrow, try something new. Use the Pomodoro Technique, originally developed by Francesco Cirillo, to work in focused sprints throughout the day. In Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, Staffan Nöteberg shows you how to organize your work to accomplish more in less time. There’s no need for expensive software or fancy planners. You can get started with nothing more than a piece of paper, a pencil, and a kitchen timer.

The best part of the above statement is that it is 100% true. I haven’t had enough time to really evaluate the use of the Pomodoro Technique, but the book really lays it out in a clean an easy to understand way.

Author Staffan Nöteberg has really written a quick read about the Pomodoro Technique, that will allow you to breeze through the book, learning the technique as you go.

The book is short, approx 200 pages total, with each page being an indepenent thought or section. You literally could read a single page each time you sat down and feel good about stopping in the middle of a chapter. The thoughts are clear and expressed in a clean format that really makes the things stick.

The technique itself is really simple. And Staffan’s style of writing only makes it even easier to pick up and use.

I would strongly suggest getting Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time if you plan to learn or at least try the Pomodoro Technique, even more so if you plan for the year is to be more productive!

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to write a review on this book today either.

Cover Art

I recently finished reading Coders at Work, written by Peter Seibel (@peterseibel), and published by Apress. What an amazing book to read, I can’t even begin to express how much I actually enjoyed this book, and I know I am gushing, but this was a real treat for me.

I have always been amazed by the past of computing, the idea of computers as large as houses, filling entire warehouses for simple punch card technology, hell punch cards! I love hearing the stories of how things were, getting the first networks going, writing the first program for any technology, making something that everyone everywhere now uses and doesn’t think twice about why it works the way it works.

In Coders At Work Peter Seibel interviews some of the legends of technology including Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google Inc.), Jamie Zawinkski (major Mozilla contributor, @jwz), and plenty more.

The book was written in the same tune as Writers at Work, and Founders at Work, to showcase the beginnings of coding, and to give an idea of how the world of coding as we know it has come to be.

There is no magic code revealed in the book, and there are no tutorials, just a bunch of old hackers explaining why they did what they did and how and what they learned from the experience.

As of this writing Apress hasn’t made available a sample chapter, which is too bad, it would be a great tease and only make you want more of this book.

To give you an idea of what you would be investing in, here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, where Peter is interviewing Jamie Zawinski an early Netscape/Mozilla developer. Peter has asked Zawinski about working with Peter Norvig at Berkely, here is his response:

Yeah. That was a very strange job. They had a whole bunch
of grad students who’d been doing research on natural language
understanding; they were basically linguists who did some
programming. So they wanted someone to take these bits and pieces
of code they’d left behind and integrate them into one thing that
actually worked.
That was incredibly difficult because I didn’t have the background to
understand what in the world they were doing. So this would happen
a lot: I’d be looking at something; I’d be completely stuck. I have no
idea what this means, where do I go from here, what do I have to read
to understand this. So I’d ask Peter. He’d be nice about it—he’d say,
“It totally makes sense that you don’t understand that yet. I’ll sit down
and explain it to you Tuesday.” So now I’ve got nothing to do. So I
spent a lot of time working on windows system stuff and poking
around with screen savers and just the kind of UI stuff that I’d been
doing for fun before.
After six or eight months of that it just felt like, wow, I’m really just
wasting my time. I’m not doing anything for them, and I just felt like I
was on vacation. There have been times when I was working really a
lot when I’d look back at that and I’m like, “Why did you quit the
vacation job? What is wrong with you? They were paying you to write
screen savers!”

A good deal of the book is great history of how integrated the coding world really is, and you see a lot of the progression of technology through the book.

If you are the sort of person who enjoys sitting with the masters of your field, and listening to the stories and pondering what it would have been like to have to program everything in Assembly, or possibly in LISP, then you have to read Coders at Work, and then leave it in your reading room, and make sure others get a chance to read it as well.

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!

I don’t know how Sitepoint knew it, but they are right, I suck at CSS! Luckily I came across this book and all that is going to change.

Sitepoint authors Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank to you through a few of the new abilities of CSS in the coming browsers. They discuss CSS tables, and layout for pretty much the whole book.

Jokingly you could really call this book “Everything you want to know about CSS tables” as the main of the 5 chapters is solely about the topic of creating and understanding CSS tables. The remainder of the book seemed to be some good Microsoft bashing referring to IE6,7 and 8.

The book was short, and a quick read. Weighing in at roughly 111 pages, and only 5 chapters, it is an easy weekend, or one night read. 

The majority of the CSS tactics they cover (CSS Tables) will work in current browsers with the exception of the Microsoft browsers. They base alot of the information on the idea that IE8 will be coming soon, and as you can download the beta now it is worth trying out the code shown in this book and seeing what we can do in the near future when users finally get their browsers up to date.

As always you can pick up this book at Sitepoint’s website or at Amazon.com

CISSP in 21 Days (Packt Pub)

When I picked up this book I was hoping for a 21 day romp into the world of CISSP. This is not the case. What CISSP in 21 Days is however is pretty awesome.

To become a CISSP you have to have 5 years experience in one of the 10 domains, pass a 100 question test about the 10 domains of being a CISSP, and adhere to a code of ethics set forth by the ISC2.

Now if you have the above requirements licked, then you are going to need CISSP in 21 Days. This is the best review book I have seen for this certification, and it is an easy read.

Author M. L. Srinivasan, CISSP, takes you day by day for 21 days reviewing all the domains of the CISSP. He covers Access Control, Application Security and more.

Be warned this book will not get your ready for your CISSP test if you don’t already have the knowledge, this is just a primer!

With that said, I can suggest to anyone thinking of becoming a CISSP, like me, to get this book and read it. Then go back through the book and review each section outside of the book as well. Read about application security and then go and get the required knowledge under you belt. The book will act as an outline for what you need to know to pass the CISSP.

For this and other great titles check out Packt Publishing’s website, and pick this book up at Amazon.com today!

firstPress Android Essentials by Apress

Apress’s firstPress books are written as short and succinct as possible to engage the reader and provide them a starting point in a given technology. They are intented to be released and read as close to the technology release as possible to gain the maxiumum experience in the shortest amount of time. Unfortunately in some cases, this rapid-release structure doesn’t pan out so well, which is a flaw that this book suffers from. Thankfully this flaw does not render the book completely useless.

From the beginning of Android Essentials, it’s clear that Chris Haseman is passionate about mobile development and very excited about Android and its possibilities. He provides clear instructions and walks the reader through each part of an Android application, as well as providing hints and tricks within the Eclipse environment to make Android development even easier. While it’s not an instuction book on how to write Java, as Chris points out early on, most developers with a basic understanding of the language should be able to power their way through the examples and concepts. Chris doesn’t hold the readers hand through Java structure or development, but he progresses at a comfortable pace that should allow for any referential reading that may be  necessary.

The example code is where the reader may experience the most frustration. All code in the book was written using the M5-RC15 version of the Android SDK, which is two steps below the current release, 1.0-R2. While it may still be possible to run the M5 version of the SDK in a currect Eclipse installation, it is much easier and recommended to use the latest release so that any applications developed will work with current handsets. This means that only the first project in the book will actually build and launch correctly and all the others require small to moderately large adjustments. Anything from ‘add a line here and change that line there’ to ‘completely re-build this function from scratch’ is needed to get each example running. From a learning standpoint, this is where the book doesn’t hold up well. It can be difficult at best to find the correct solution, and even a web search may only yield a few hand-made solutions with the tag ‘your mileage may vary’.

Interestingly, this is can also be a saving factor for this book. Not everyone prefers to read a book where all the answers are laid out and available for download. Part of the enjoyment of development is knowing that you have created something for a purpose, and using this book’s code examples and the provided instruction is a great launching pad to discover your own way to build the same applications. So while it may take some extra time to make the examples work, the personal effort will usually leave a more lasting impression than just retyping the code into your favorite editor and verifying that the application does what it should.

Overall, I think that Android Essentials is a fair starting point for the beginning Android developer. For a serious developer, it’s a good book for idea reference, and for a beginner it’s a good start to see what is possible with Android. My final recommendation would be to wait and hope for an updated release of this book, or at least the code it contains. While I do enjoy discovering my own way through a particular application, more reliable starting code would have allowed me to spend more time developing my own applications instead of repairing another developer’s.

Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More

Kevin McArthur is a self-taught entreperneur and opensource developer from Edmonton Alberta. Kevin has been running a very successful PHP application development studio for over 7 years. Additionally Kevin took time to write Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More, published by Apress.

The book really lives up to the name. It disucsses in great details the framworks that are most popular including Zend Framework. Kevin has what seems an infinite amount of knowledge on Zend Framework, and a quick Google search will reveal he is quite active is sharing that information.

I was a little let down on the Testing and Code Control sections of the book. I felt like Kevin mearly skimmed, and could have really dug into more detail, espeically about testing.

In talking about patterns for PHP Kevin reinforces some of the basics of good programming, and explains the pros and cons of each style of framework. You can tell he has spent his fair share of time in each of the patterns discussed.

Overall if you are thinking about playing with patterns and frameworks this is the book for you. Don’t look for any golden knowledge about testing, but the rest is gold!

This weekend I had the opportunity to read RESTful PHP, by Samisa Abeysinghe, published by Packt Publishing. The book is short, about 200 pages, but full of great information about what REST is, how it is used, how it is supposed to be used and how to use it with PHP.

The book assumes you have a working knowledge of PHP, and how to install extensions (or use existing ones). The concepts are clear and concise. Samisa is direct, but explains the reasons for why code is the way it is, or explains what can be done different.

The books runs through many examples using Yahoo! and Amazon APIs. Most of the book could be called a manual for use of CURL and SimpleXML, as well as some DOM work. Although you will not need to know any of those things before picking up this book.

In a short seven chapters Samisa explains what rest is, who uses it, why it is used, and what you can do with it. Samisa walks you through consuming (or using) REST APIs and also how to setup your own APIs using the REST style and architecture.

I would recommend this book to any beginning and middle tiers PHP developer as it is a quick reference to REST and APIs that you know you already want to be working with.