TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Confucius himself has once stated that learning by mimicry is a cheap and painless way to get smarter: truer words have rarely been spoken. As the dollar price falls lower and lower, advertising on US-based sites is more affordable than ever…but coming across ideas and execution models is as hard as it always was. Can Gradation Design help out?

The book is created by a Japanese publisher called PIE Books and is almost completely free of text – instead, it is chock-full with over 200 different designs from all markets (CD covers, posters, packaging,..). As with most “photobooks”, some concepts are lovely while others suck:

A small second part contains a table of various gradients based on pretty weird colors – I have found these very useful when it came to making my own designs:

Unfortunately, the book suffers from a weakness found common to almost all “photobooks” and similar fine art stuff: availability. Amazon currently lists the book as out-of-stock and charges moderate 31$ for it – the publisher’s site is completely useless…

In the end, PIE Books Gradation design is one of the most inspirational tomes I dug through so far – many of my future banner ads will be based on gradients. If you enjoy looking at “photobooks” and can get your hands at a copy, hit it – people who prefer text-based books should stay far away as they are likely to be disappointed…

The world-wide Sudoku craze is starting to ebb off – unfortunately, Mr. Lee’s book has been laying around in our labs for quite some time. So far so good: is it still worth buying?

Programming Sudoku is divided into seven chapters. The first looks at the rules of the game and can serve as an excellent introduction to the game for beginners and people who never cared about Sudoku puzzles(e.g. yours truly).

The second chapter looks at Visual Basic.NET and at designing applications for Windows. A nice load of basics are transported in the process: people who can program in C or VB6 will be able to pick the ball with ease.

The next three chapters look at various algorithmic tricks that can be used to tackle Sudoku puzzles. Even though Sudoku itself is straightforward, solving “difficult” puzzles can require extremely sophisticated and interesting algorithms…

Chapter six is especially interesting: it looks at methods for generating puzzles. Toppling around solving algorithms generally is a very interesting approach: this tome takes it to the max.

Finally, an appendix looks at a soduku derivative called Kakuro…

Wei-Meng Lee did an excellent job clarifying key concepts. The sample code is easy to understand, images are deployed wherever they are useful:

In the end, Programming Sudoku is an excellent read for people who feel like reading up on methods for solving puzzles with a PC. The methods learned here probably can be applied to other games easily… However, the book has an additional positive effect: it serves as a quick introduction into Visual Basic.NET. If you currently develop Palm apps and plan to move over to .NET CF, getting this book will pay out. As for the price: at 17$@Amazon’s , it’s a total bargain!

Gather together a bunch of master programmers, and ask each one of them to write a chapter about a bit of code that they are really fascinated about. Pack it all up, sell it, and donate the proceeds to a charity of choice – in short, this is the thought process that went into O’Reilly’s Beautiful Code. The tome is almost 600 pages thick – but can it stack up?

The book is subdivided into 33 parts which each were written by a different author. Thus, each chapter is (mostly) independent from all others, code samples are written in different languages,… . Topics covered range from “simple” things like sorting to Google’s Map-and-Reduce-approach for massively parallel computing – in short, you are treated to a “smorgasboard” of things that could be interesting to the one or the other.

Much of the book looks at Open Source code that is freely available on the net – for example, chapter 2 takes a detailed look at a part of the subversion version control system. Another highly interesting chapter by Charles Petzold looks at dynamically generating code for the .NET framework – as I also write PocketPC applications, I naturally considered it a very interesting read.

As usual for such collection tomes, project management and code style also got covered, and a few chapters on various web-service related things round the book off.

In the end, Beautiful Code definitely contains a load of nice, innovative code samples. However, like the No Fluff Just Stuff anthologies, the book does not present itself in a coherent fashion – the multitude of authors definitely demands its toll here. People who are used to rigidly structured books will not be too happy with it. People wanting a quick overview of the topics covered(look at the table of contents here), get ready to pay 40$ at Amazon’s.

Long-time TamsPalm readers will know Scott Berkun as the guy behind one of the best project management books ever(ugly review; but great book). Scott’s latest oeuvre looks at all kinds of urban myths surrounding innovation – read on to find out if it’s a real zinger!

The first chapters of the book looks at various theories surrounding the creation of innovative ideas – for example, do innovative ideas really come in a single moment(e.g. Newton’s apple); or aren’t these moments just the result of long and hard work. Scott Berkun explains why history always centers around “the lone inventor”; and uncovers a few stunning inaccuracies in common history.

After having identified the sources where ideas come from, the reader is confronted with various reasons why innovative ideas can fail(even if they are insanely innovative). For example, why are most devices still shipping with QWERTY keyboards, even though Dvorak ones are much more efficient? Or, what could be done to make the USA use metric units and avoid space disasters like the one of the Mars Orbiter? The book then ends with a nice list of related books recommended for everyone interested in creating innovative things.

As usual for Scott Berkun and O’Reilly, the book is very easy to read. Impressive and/or amusing photographs appear all over the book – cutting a long story short, The Myths of Innovation feels like a novel rather than a classic tech book.

In the end, Scott managed to deliver yet another well-written and generally well-done book – but the subject matter is not something that every developer needs to know about. If the lines above managed to stir your interest, the price of 15$ makes this an impulse purchase that you will not regret. Last but not least, it also makes a great gift(great, easily available, cheap) – even for people who are not really into tech.

The No Fluff Just Stuff roadshow has toured American cities for a few years introducing software developers to a variety of topics that currently are ‘hot’ in the industry. Of course, not every chapter is relevant to everybody…let’s see what the ‘content mix’ contains this year:

Development for handheld computers is separating more and more from ‘mainstream’ coding – for example, web services are becoming more and more important in the desktop world, while their importance for mobile development still is very limited. Thus, many of the excellent chapters on AJAX, JavaScript and other web related topics are rather useless…

Eclipse is covered in a separate chapter. The hints given herein could be of great value for users of an Eclipse-based development environment like Palm OS/Garnet OS Developer suite or Nokia’s Carbide.c++…finding plug-ins has never been a particular hobby of mine. No Fluff Just Stuff also covers IntelliJ a bit – this was a very interesting read for me as it shows what a modern IDE can accomplish…

As usual, Venkat Subramaniam looks at an agile development-related matter. This time, he chose ‘Bootstrapping Agility’…and looked at prequisites for agile development from a ‘why-it-works’ view.

A very useful chapter looking at the basics of usability and a list of each author’s favorite technical tool complete the list of topics.

The book’s paper quality is high as usual for O’Reilly – a Parker 45 with x-nib did not have any blotting issues. The book also survived a few days in my briefcase well…all o.k. here. The code examples come in a variety of languages, reading them can be a bit challenging for a C-only programmer.

Overall, the No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology 2007 is not a book that gets purchased for a specific reason like learning Eclipse or Agility. Rather, it is intended to give you an overview of ‘what’s hot’ in the industry…and this is a job that it accomplishes well. If you wish to ‘stay in the curve’, get the book at Amazon’s…

With the demise of the Palm OS platform, publishers became less and less interested in creating books about Palm OS development-related topics. PODS, the only ‘somewhat supported’ IDE for Palm OS still stands without a printed documentation book…but since it’s Eclipse-based, O’Reilly sent me their Pocket Guide to fill the void(btw…it actually is pink, but my scanner somehow went on a strike):

The Pocket Guide starts out by looking at the installation process for Eclipse. PODS has a different installation system(with a wizard)…not much to gain here.

After that, Ed Burnette moves on to cover the basics of the Eclipse IDE…views, editors and perspectives. Even though the book is very compact, it contained quite a few new and interesting details that I didn’t know about before(e.g. foldout views…a real screen real-estate saver). Chapters 3 and 4 cover Eclipse usage for Java development..but reading them still pays out, as much of the process is applicable to Palm OS C development.

The remaining chapters of the book present various ‘bonus’ features of Eclipse that can be really useful. For example, did you know that Eclipse’s task view automatically parses your code for comments like //TODO?

Last but not least, the book contains a table of keyboard shortcuts that can greatly simplify the life of coders who use PODS on a laptop or generally don’t like to use the mouse much.

O’Reilly’s books never were problematic from a quality point of view. Paper quality is high, and the compact size makes transportation easy. The book contains loads of illustrations and can be read in a very short time:

Overall, if you use PODS to develop applications, you must get this book by all means! While a few pages will not be applicable to Palm OS C development, the time-saving insight given herein was a real helper even for a PODS veteran like me. The price of 10$ at Amazon’s voids all discussion…if you use PODS, get this…NOW!

When one hears Digital Photography – expert techniques, one first thinks about composition and such stuff. But if this is what you expect, there may be better books…Ken Milburn’s tome is very focussed on Photoshop! But is the selection of topics interesting…read on to find out!

The book starts off by looking at what a workflow is, why you should have one and how it should look. After that, it moves on to digital camera techniques for stuff like steady shooting and other things. A look at monitor calibration ends this (well-done) segment.

After that, the book moves on to Photoshop techniques for ‘technically’ better images. You learn how to apply filters(selectively) to enhance contrast and other parameters. A chapter on RAW files is there, too – useful for everyone who has a camera that dumps RAW files. Chapters on repairing and montaging pictures are in the book’s repertoire too.

The last chapter of the book is very interesting – it presents ways to make money with your images…interesting and maybe even lucrative!

Digital Photography Expert Techniques is well-written and contains many color illustrations. Paper quality is very high – no blotting with the Parker 45 x-nib.

Overall, if you use Photoshop for image post-processing, purchase this book by all means. The hints given inside are really worthwile, and the price of 30$ on Amazon is o.k.. If you, on the other hand, use an alternative image processor(read: GIMP) or none, this book will not help you very much. While many of the workflows can also be applied to GIMP, the ‘wisdom’ transported here can probably be had cheaper elsewhere.