Denver Open Source Users Group

Review: Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

As a developer and designer involved in the social web app scene, I'm always looking for insights to a project whether it's in a conceptual or production setting. "Designing for the Social Web" by Joshua Porter not only addresses social application viability from a design perspective, but provides insights for ground-up development that all involved individuals should take into account.

Every designer and developer should have this title as a must-read--as it ties core objectives and framework together. Chapter 2 "A Framework for Social Web Design" and chapter 3 "Authentic Conversations" establish a groundwork for software and interface developers in understanding a successful structure for social applications.

At 177 pages, this book is a quick-enough read that anyone involved in the social web applications should give it a look.

Slide:ology Review

Only since I've purchased Presentation Zen have I've been so changed by a book about presenting, education, and sharing ideas with others.  This book is about the mechanics of assembling a better presentation; who better to write it than the queen of presentations, Mrs. Nancy Duarte.  Just one of her claims to fame (and a rightful one at that) is designing the slides for An Inconvenient Truth, presented and turned into a movie by Mr. Al Gore.

I only wish I could afford to drop off copies of this book at the desk of every colleague that I interact and present with at DOSUG, DJUG, and beyond.  The transformation that the ideas contained in this book would have on their presentations is simply phenomenal.  Nancy builds incrementally on each step in the book, taking you to better and deeper approaches to improving your presentations.  She gives away her insider secrets on assembling slide order (spoiler: post it notes, used in creative ways + thoughts about snow globes), and what to put (and not to put) on your slides.  You'll be surprised what she tells you to leave out.

If you are a casual or professional presenter you owe it to yourself to buy a copy of this book.  Your presentations will be transformed to a higher level of training for your audience.

Adobe Flex 3 Training from the Source is a kick-start guide to learning the revolutionary "web 2.0" capabilities this present and ever-growing technology provides. Authors Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola, and Matthew Boles establish clear, step-by-step tutorials and application development that are clear and easy to absorb no matter the scope or scale of coding.

What's best in the 26 lessons is the gradual build-up of skills--each lesson carefully stretching previous chapter's elements and taking them to a new level of programming and extension. This build-up and repetition of skills helps to solidify concepts, syntax, and best practices while never becoming redundant.

Whether readers come from an existing Flash/ActionScript background, an application designer needing additional coding skills, or as a total newcomer to OOP concepts and Rich Internet Application development, Training from the Source is the finest start.

Without a doubt, this book steps up to the challenge of introducing and showcasing the amazing capabilities Flex 3 has to offer and opens a door to endless possibilities for all involved in the design, development and deployment of Internet-base applications.

A Brief But Thorough Tour of Ajax

Bulletproof Ajax will surprise you at first at its slim 196 pages of content.  But as with any book, it's the density of good information and quality of writing that count the most.  I find both to be on the mark in both respects.  The content is timely, relevant, and very up to date.  As we all know, the landscape in web design can make one thing hot and another not in a matter of months.  It is a credit to the New Riders+Peachpit group that they could get such a relevant book on shelves while it still packed a punch.

This book is best suited to the newcomer to Ajax that will appreciate the entire survey of how it came to be, how the XMLHttpRequest limitations hold you back from accessing any other domain than the one serving up the page.  However, Jeremy quickly shows you the workaround -- JSON and the script tag, which have no such limitations.  This is an example of the dense and useful content I said this book is notable for.

The author then explains his methodology for gracefully degrading Ajaxed pages that he calls the "Hijax" approach.  You would be right to ask, why do I need the author to tell me about degrading?  I just want to Ajax everything on my pages.  But the author gives you insight into the hodgepodge of support the various Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers provide, each with their own quirks.  This is a real timesaving chapter.  Learn from the author's research on this topic.

Lastly, the book gives you a full beginning-to-end tour of applying all you have learned in the book in a chapter they title "Putting it all together."  As a "just get me to the code" kind of guy, this is the chapter I immediately turned to when I opened the book for the first time.  I definitely think persons new to Ajax will covet this chapter.  It assembles all the building blocks for Ajax in a way that will make it click for most developers.

In summary, this book is brief, and not exhaustive, but that's the very reason I purchased it.  It doesn't get wordy, the chapters are accurate and information-packed, and the book concludes with a nice bringing-it-all-together example that lets you see a tangible manifestation to everything you have learned.  This books comes with my strong commendations.
 

Manning is set to release JBoss in Action in or around May of 2008.

Here is Matthew McCullough's review of the Early Access of the book:

I've been a user of JBoss Application Server for several years now.  It has firmly encroached into the territory of WebLogic, WebSphere, and Geronimo and is proving to be the dominant player in the appserver realm.

This book nicely takes you from downloading, installing, to thoroughly using and exploiting the power of JBoss AS.  If you are an advanced user, skip ahead a bit.  If you are new to JBoss, start right at the

beginning and let the authors help you get started.

No detail of JBoss is left uncovered in this book.  The authors touch on topics such as MBeans, deploying your apps, the archtecture of the classloaders, and the JMX console, just to name a few.  If there's an aspect of JBoss you are yearning for a few words to a full explantion of, just search this book.  You will find it, guaranteed.

The most important and valuable section of this book is the section on Security.  Locking down and understanding the means by which people could surrepitiously gain access to your apps is nearly as critical as building your app.  I think the authors do an excellent job of covering this aspect.

In closing, I feel this book does excellent justice to the latest version of the JBoss Application Server 5.0.  The authors write in a clear and informative style and I highly recommend you purchase it upon its (soon) release.