Mar

16

New look and feel. Do you like it?

Filed Under Books, General, Ruby on Rails | 6 Comments

Those who follow this blog through the feed, may not have noticed it, but over the weekend I had a chance to revamp the look of Zen and the Art of Programming. I used a Wordpress theme I’d already employed on Math Blog and customized it, basing my changes on the suggestions of the participants of my earlier survey on the subject. I’m not a web designer by any means, but I’m quite happy with the way it looks and the overall clean feel this new layout lends the site. What do you think about it?

While at it, I also updated my About page and added a thumbnail of the cover of my book to the sidebar. I finished writing Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers a couple of months ago and am now waiting for Wrox to do their magic and get it into stores. The book should leave Wrox’s warehouse towards the end of this month and reach customers in early April. But I’ll talk about my book and the subject of writing a technical book more in future posts.

Dec

13

Learn Merb

Filed Under Books, Merb, Ruby, Ruby on Rails | 40 Comments

Merb's logoThe most effective martial artists specialize in their discipline, but are not afraid to cross-train in others. Bruce Lee—arguably the most famous and influential martial artist of the past century—trained first in Tai Chi Chuan, then Gung Fu, and boxing, as well as learning western fencing. The insight taken from so many disciplines led him to create the Jeet Kune Do form of combat.

Programmers are not all that different. Cross-training in other languages and frameworks can only improve one’s overall mastery of the craft. When it comes to Ruby frameworks, the two most popular choices are Ruby on Rails and Merb. They’re often seen as being contenders, but this truly isn’t a zero-sum game; learning both is a very sensible move. They both enable you to write web applications in Ruby, and are somewhat similar, so learning one after you know the other shouldn’t be very challenging. In the many cases people learn Merb after they’ve had some experience with Rails, but either way, acquiring a solid grasp of both frameworks provides developers with extra flexibility. Often people who learn both, will end up mostly just using one or another, depending on their individual preferences. But it’s worth knowing them so as to be able to write both CRUD-style applications that fall within Rails’ solution space, and more complex, edge cases where Rails’ opinions will end up contending with yours.

Among the reasons to give Merb a chance, is its focus on performance, a smaller memory footprint and an extreme level of modularity, which enables you to pick and choose which components you’d like to use.

Merb is not as mature as Rails, of course, but it has reached version 1.0.x and with it developers can have greater confidence in a more stabilized API. Now is perhaps the best moment to get involved and learn more about this rising framework. Not surprisingly though, Merb finds itself in a similar spot to the one that Rails was in a couple of years ago (in terms of weakness of documentation when it comes to getting started). Thankfully, this point is being taken seriously and there’s been some major progress in terms of improving the documentation for Merb. Below are some useful links to get you started with Merb.

Merb has an official API documentation, a wiki, a google group, and a community site called Merbunity for news, projects and tutorials. The irc.freenode.net #merb channel is also a useful and welcoming spot. Furthermore, there is a Peepcode PDF draft called Meet Merb. If you want something even more substantial, on the book front there are several titles coming out in the near future. These include Merb in Action, The Merb Way, Beginning Merb and Merb: What You Need To Know. There is also an open source Merb book, whose development is led by Matt Aimonetti. It’s a work in progress, but probably a very good starting point, which just happens to have the added bonus of being free. And if your interested in Merb, don’t miss InfoQ’s interview with Yehuda Katz, who’s Merb’s lead developer and one of the sharpest guys we have in the Ruby community.

Finally, if you are a professional developer who wants to quickly progress with Merb and bring their skills to the next level, do not miss your chance to attend a three day intensive course on Merb, which is being offered by Yehuda and Matt in Phoenix, AZ between January 19 and 21 (2009). Registration has been open for two days already and 20 out of the 30 available spots have already been snapped up. The remaining seats won’t last more than a day or two, so if you are interested, don’t delay (sign up now and you’ll also benefit from an early registration price).

2009 is almost here, so why not take the opportunity to learn Merb this year?

Dec

1

IBM’s XML Challenge (lots of prizes inside)

Filed Under Books, DB2, General | 18 Comments

The XML ChallengeIBM is holding a series of challenges centered around XML. The whole event is labeled The XML Challenge (subtitle: Search for the XML superstar). Rockstar references aside, this is a pretty cool initiative that can provide you with some freebies as well as high quality prizes if you win any of the available contests.

The Contests

What I say below applies to US and Canada, as the contest is being held worldwide in 30 countries separately, and each of these may have different individual contests and prizes as well. In fact, the first thing you’ll see when you visit the xmlchallenge.com site should be a popup that prompts you to select your country.

For US/Canada there are 5 contests: Video, Gadget, Query, Porting and XML. The Video Contest consists of creating a funny/creative/cool video about XML, XQuery and/or DB2. The Gadget Contest is about developing a downloadable gadget/widget that leverages DB2. The Query Contest requires you to use XQuery to query a database and come up with the answer to five questions. The Ported Application Contest is all about porting an existing application to DB2 or creating a new one that uses DB2. And finally, the XML Contest asks you to build a useful, user-friendly XML application from scratch. The last two contests can be approached as a team or as an individual. The Query, Ported App and XML contests start today!

You don’t have to participate in all of them, of course. But by participating in any of these you gain points, and there are six badges that you can obtain: XML Challenger, XML Rookie, XML Whiz, XML Star, XML Master and XML Grand Master. I feel so nerdy reporting this. The XML Grand Masters will be enrolled in a draw for an additional prize.

The Prizes

Speaking of prizes, let’s see what goodies are up for grab. There will be a few give-aways just for participating. For example, the first 500 participants will receive an XML Challenge T-Shirt as well as a Rubick’s Cube. The first 1000 to complete the Quick Quiz during registration will also receive a free T-Shirt. But let’s move on to the more substantial prizes.

For the sake of awarding prizes, the contestants will be split in two groups, students and professional developers.

The Video Contest: The deadline is December 17, 2008 and a few selected winners will receive an 8GB iPod Video Nano (for both students and developers).

The Gadget Contest: The deadline is December 17, 2008 and the winning students grab Canon Powershot SD870 Cameras, while winning developers get 80GB Zunes.

The Query Contest: After you register, you’ll have 24 hours to submit your answers. The first 50 successful participants for each group (for a combined total of 100) will receive a 1GB USB key, while all the contestants with the right answers will be entered in a draw for a grand prize. This is a Playstation 3 40GB for the students, and a 32GB iPod Touch for the developers;

The Ported Application Contest: The deadline is January 31st, 2009. The winning team or individual amongst the students will receive an HD Pavilion HDX Notebook, while the winning developer will score a Lenovo IdeaPad U110. The second prize for both of the two groups will a Garmin nüvi GPS.

The XML Contest: The deadline is January 31st, 2009. The 1st prize for each group will be a high-end 17″ Alienware Laptop (two laptops will be awarded in total). The second prize for both groups will be a Nintendo Wii (again, two in total).

Finally, two lucky XML Grand Masters, one developer and one student, will receive a Bose Wave Radio II.

I hope you consider enrolling now and best of luck! If you need some help with getting started with DB2 Express-C, you can download the free e-book which is available in several languages. Oh, and finally we have an Italian version as well.

Promote this post

Hey, would you give me a hand in promoting this post? If you are in the US or Canada, and mention & link to this post from your blog, you’ll receive a free XML Challenge T-Shirt and a Rubick’s Cube as well. All you have to do is send me an email (to acangiano at gmail.com) with a link to your blog entry, as well as your shirt size and complete mailing address. Thank you!

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