Melrose Solutions Blog - book review

Book Review: Regular Expressions in 10 minutes

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 08:47:00 +0100

Regular expressions have always been a bit of a mystery to me. I knew they were very powerful, but they've never been very intuitive. In the past, I've been fortunate to work with developers who could build them for me. I also have the book Regular Expression Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, and as a last resort, I've used RegExLib.com

Eventually, I realised that I needed to learn Regex properly, so I bought Regular Expressions in 10 minutes by Ben Forta

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Book Review: Lucene In Action

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:08:00 +0100

I first heard about Lucene a few years ago, as it's used to power the search functionality in BlueDragon. Although that makes it sound like an open-source version of the Verity Search Engine software, it is so much more. I've been using Lucene on my current project and have turned into a big fan. I bought the book Lucene In Action to help, and I've been equally impressed with the book.

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Book Review: Java Phrasebook

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:44:00 +0100

I've recently been using a Java for a project, which I hope to blog about later. I haven't done any Java development since version 1.2 back in 2002, so I had a a bit of catching up to do. I also needed to update my library with some Java material.

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Book Review: AdvancED DOM Scripting

Thu, 29 May 2008 22:46:00 +0100

The last few years have seen a huge shift towards building Rich Internet Applications, with technologies such as AJAX and DOM scripting to the fore. Unfortunately, the web is littered with bad examples. This book shows you how to do it properly.

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Book Review: High Performance Web Sites

Sun, 25 May 2008 22:59:00 +0100

When a website is running slow, the traditional response has been to look at optimising the application code. In fact, 90% of the response time is taken downloading and rendering the page and it's constituent elements. In the book High Performance Web Sites, Steve Souders describes 14 rules for improving front-end performance.

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Book Review: Trac and Subversion

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:29:00 +0100

I've been using subversion (svn) for several years now, and love it. I'm relativiely new to Trac though, and it was only on a recent contract that I got to try it.

From my brief experience with Trac, it's obvious that (like many other good software applications) it can be used in many different ways. However, sometimes you can miss out on the better ways to do things and conventions. I bought this book, as I wanted to see how Trac is normally used.

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Book Review: How to Start and run an Internet Business

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:56:00 +0100

10 years ago, there were barely any books on building websites, let alone running an internet business.

Back then, as a veteran of the first dot.com bubble, I witnessed directors insisting that the Internet was a totally new way of doing business. Many people believed this, and the bubble grew. Eventually though, people started looking at a very old business element - profit - and it soon became apparent that age-old business rules still applied...

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Book Review: JavaScript Phrasebook

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:16:00 +0100

Up until recently, most of my JavaScript work has been fairly minimal. Most javascript form validation is dealt with by cfform, and the main other uses have been for simple things like pop-ups. There's been a few more complex development tasks, but nothing of considerable scale.

Recently though, I've started looking at the new Ajax functionality with coldfusion 8. Although a lot of this is already in place out of the box, I realised that I needed to brush up on things.

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Book Review: JavaScript -The Definitive Guide

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 17:10:00 +0100

As the owner of over 50 IT related books, I've come to realise that the majority will fit into one of three categories:

Beginners Guides These are for people new to the specific subject, and are there to get them up to speed quickly. They're usually first spotted by the traditional 'Hello World' example, although some will start off with the very basics and give you a history on computing.
Cook Books These books are for people with plenty of experience in the subject, but are just too lazy to figure out things from scratch. As such, they are invaluable. They provide solutions to common problems, so the weary programmer doesn't have to re-invent the wheel.
Reference Books The goal here is too document every single feature of the subject.

It's this last category that JavaScript — The Definitive Guide (JSTDG) very definitely comes under.

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