How do I go about learning web typography? I see many sites using nice font stacks in a way that they seems written on paper by Latex.
I've tried digging into their code, but I'm somewhat lost. Which book do you think I have to buy and study? Is there any on line resource or screencasts series do you think I need to see? I'm a true beginner in both typography and web typography.
I already own Robert Bringhust bible but I understood that although the principles are valid applying them on a web need more effort and so I interrupted reading it with the hope that a specific book on the web typography exists: any suggestion?
There are lot's of great online resources on the web, although perhaps not one main one to best them all.
I'd advise taking a look at the work of Tim Brown at http://nicewebtype.com, there is some useful information there.
Also check out the Type Study blog series on Typekit: http://blog.typekit.com/category/type-study/ for a ranging set of topics.
From those you should be able to find your way to other resources.
If you have the Robert Bringhurst bible you might be interested in this: http://webtypography.net/ which takes elments of the book and looks at them in the context of the web.
Related
Note: I tagged this under R because I am an R user, but the topic of this question is general, so I appreciate any input regardless of programing language.
Hello Everyone,
My company is expanding into a data-science/developer field and will be developing codes/scripts in the near future. I want to develop a standard practice for when it comes to sharing and archiving developed codes internally. The main point being would be if we develop a code today, what can we do to that code and around that code so that it can be readily understandable 5 years from now. Essentially, what are the best practices when it comes to code sharing and archiving it?
I did some research for this, so I understand the preference for DRY (Don't repeat yourself) to WET (We enjoy typing), having a top level README, readable and easily to understand comments, as well as having screenshots or examples of the finished product. What are your thoughts on these practices, how could they be improved?
It's very easy to explain NoSQL from high level view - it is basically "key-value" storage. Of course with thousand minor and important things, but in general it's just key value storage.
What's the best way to explain Hadoop and Map/Reduce?
May be some "real world" example which can be easy to give an compare for even newbies? Thanks!
I recently found this great article describing Map Reduce :
I’ve been planning on writing about
the Google’s MapReduce algorithm for
some time but I couldn’t find a good
practical example. Then we had a
Northwest C++ Users Group presentation
by Steve Yegge and a followup
discussion and beers, and I had a
little epiphany. Steve was talking
about, among other things, the build
process. And that’s just a bunch of
algorithms that are perfect for
explaining MapReduce.
The code examples are in C++, but the content is really language agnostic.
Here's a great tutorial on map/reduce in general, explaining the background, basics and data flow. I'm finding it useful to explain Google's App Engine implementation as well.
http://developer.yahoo.com/hadoop/tutorial/module4.html
Let's say I've come up with what I think is a clean and elegant solution to a common generic requirement in coding projects. I'm happy to share my code but my main motivation for publishing it would be to get feedback from a quality audience about my solution and to determine if it has been done better elsewhere, if it could be done better, if it is buggy, etc. The normal sorts of reasons a programmer would want feedback for.
The Code Project - ugly forum/comment interface and a serious pain when you want to update the article after it has been categorised. Can also be horribly slow at times.
CodePlex - not really a general code community; people would have to know what they're looking for in advance to find my code.
It would be fantastic if something like a simplified version of The Code Project were produced by the Stack Overflow team with a view to allow users to show off pieces of code and get feedback, thus leading to general skills improvement of everyone participating. A bit like Scott Hanselman's Weekly Source Code blog posts, but with more of a communal purpose. In the mean time, however, what do you suggest?
It would be fantastic if something like a simplified version of The Code Project were produced by the Stack Overflow team with a view to allow users to show off pieces of code and get feedback, thus leading to general skills improvement of everyone participating.
There's now a sister Q&A website exactly for this purpose — Code Review.
You could post your solutions here, as an answer to a question describing the problem that it proposes to solve.
You're likely to get at least a little feedback, and see other edits/version of a similar solution.
I'm a totally blind individual who would like to learn more of the theory aspect of computer science. I've had an intro data structures class and the general intro programming but would like to learn more on things such as software design, advanced data structures, and compiler design. I want to do this as a self study course not as part of college classes.
Unfortunately there aren’t many text books available on computer science from Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic where I normally get my textbooks. I would appreciate any electronic resources preferably free that could help me get more of a computer science education rather then the newest language or platform that a lot of programming sites appear to focus on.
You might find the Experiences of a Blind Computer Scientist a good read.
MIT's Open Courseware would be a good resource for you with the amount of videos/audio they have.
Really though, for the core computer-science topics I find it pretty hard to beat some of the better textbooks out there. Some offer digital versions of their book with purchase and some don't. For those that don't, I would just purchase the book and then download via a torrent site a digital e-book equivelant. Since you already own the book I don't think this would be a major problem.
UC Berkley has a couple of computer science courses online for free as mp3 and video files (including RSS feed for each course). And if reading PDF files aren't an issue you could check out O'Reilly's Safari.
The text book for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs appears to be accessible. Software engineering radio is a good podcast that I listen to but recently has focused a lot on model driven development and UML which doesn't interest me. The UC Berkley
lectures are of varying quality, it's like all other college classes it depends on the professor. I've found I can follow along with the cs162 lectures fine but not so much with the cs61b. Part of this is because of the professor and part is probably because 61b is more math heavy since it's a data structures class. Unfortunately the RSS feeds are useless since the file names are meaningless. I used my podcatcher to download the entire lecture series, then used the converting capability of foobar 2000 to rename the files with there track number so I could listen to them in order. I've used Safari at work before and it is accessible although to expensive for me to get a yearly subscription. Open Courseware appears to have a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately I don't use itunes so instead of downloading each mp3 file individually I used the firefox extension DownThemAll! with a custom filter to grab all the mp3 files at once from the specific course I wanted. Another series of books that looks useful are the data structures books by Bruno R. Preiss several of which are available online at
http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus5/
Some of the equations are represented as graphics but I can often tell what the general idea is by context.
I wonder would the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman be of any use?
If the audio content is enough on its own without the video, they are an excellent digital resource.
The podcast "software engineering radio" is excellent. Though not CS courseware, it is the most academic and intellectually stimulating podcast I have found about software development and computer science.
http://www.se-radio.net/
personally I am just blown away by the questioner. I mean, the challenge alone of programming is too much for most people but being without the primary sense used in the task is amazing to me. What is ironic though is I bet that given this challenge the questioner is still FAR more adept at most CS tasks than the people I work with day to day. Just saying.
I'm also a totally blind programmer, currently working for Microsoft. The most valuable resource for te technical books is Safari (safari.oreilly.com). You can read thousands of computer science texts there. if you're in the USA, you can also get many of those titles for free from BookShare (www.bookshare.org). In both cases graphical images will be an issue, but there's no easy solution for that. Most good books have enough descriptive text that one can manage without the diagrams.
I to am a new blind programmer! I only lost my vision 5 years ago. Anyway, I have been programming in Visual Basic 2008 throughout the past year. It turned out to be more accessible than I had at first suspected.
I start a Java class next semester and the required text is a free online text! It is posted below.
Introduction to Programming Using Java, Fifth Edition
http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/
Can some of you seasoned blind programmers share with us any blogs or websites where other blind programmers can be found??
Check out this Stack Overflow question about podcasts.
A language called Quorum is a lot like Python but optimized across a few more syntactic details, and the corresponding development environment is designed with the blind in mind. https://quorumlanguage.com/ This might fit especially well with the use case where most students are using Python.
A 2016 blog about CSed (actually a response to a blog post) points to
program-l discussion board for blind programmers at https://www.freelists.org/list/program-l
The EPIQ conference for blind and other programmers interested in Quorum
https://quorumlanguage.com/epiq.html
Also, see other ideas in a similar question on another SO site: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3441/teaching-a-blind-high-school-student
I need to be able to contribute to a relatively large Adobe AIR project and I'm starting from scratch with this technology. What's the best way to go about it?
I usually get a good book/tutorial and work my way through it but this time it seems there's just too much to learn for this to be feasible within a reasonable time frame. I would need books on Actionscript, FLEX, etc...
Do you know of any good resources that might be useful for this particular case?
How would you go about it if you were in my shoes?
I just had to do something similar. If you can afford it (or, get your company to pay for it), try doing a training class. I did one by Figleaf software a couple months ago and it really helped.
As for books, I hear the Essential Actionscript 3 book is good (I have the one for AS2 and it's quite good). Flex is really just the SDK. You'll be doing most of your work in AS3 and MXML.
Another really good thing to do is download the SDK and start playing with it. Think of a couple small apps to do, then write them in Flex. I did this at work (wrote a couple util Apps in Flex to learn it). I find the best way to learn is to do it, and the SDK is free so there shouldn't be anything stopping you.
Hello World for AIR, then progressively add detail.
Aggressively use any communities out there.
Blog about your experience. One day you will help someone else.
Today you are learning, tomorrow you are teaching.
I download samples from the Internet, and run them, mess with them, try to change them and understand how they work.
I subscribe to blogs on the topic and do samples, try to understan the stuff people write about.
And I do samples :)
So I basically learn from the top - down. First I get the general sense of the technology, and then I drill down with the samples to the parts that I find interesting. Works pretty well. :)
I usually find online tutorials are the best way to go. They are more to the point than books, so it's usually quicker to get up to speed. And don't limit yourself to a single resource. I've never had problems finding enough tutorials through our friend google.
I have no knowledge about Adobe AIR though. I assume your customer knows you're a noob too? ;D
I'm a big advocate of active learning, which is described in detail, here. Essentially, when you are trying to learn a new technology: read about it, discuss it with your peers, teach it to people who are even newer to the technology, and most importantly, get your hands dirty.
A perfect example of how you can learn new things is by getting involved with a community such as stackoverflow, or a discussion forum based around what you would like to learn (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/), or even by contributing to an open-source project.
Of course, none of the above is as effective as trying new things out. In order to learn new technologies (in my honest opinon), it is best to dive in "head-first" and try things out.