Recent Reading:
Measuring America
by Andro Linklater, published by Harper Collins
As a kid I often wondered, looking at my atlas, just how they got all those straight lines on the maps. Later I came to understand that in places like Africa, it was done by bureaucrats drawing lines on maps. But what about America? In the USA, most of the states were created long after the colonies won their independence in the American Revolution. Thus, when I saw this book in a pile on a table in a bookshop, I jumped at the chance to read it.
And I wasn't disappointed! Around the story of how those lines were created by surveyors using a 22 yard long chain (aka Gunters chain) Andro Linklater spins a fascinating story. That 22 yards was critical, it governed everything from the size of lots for sale, to the width of roads in cities. But the beauty of book is not just about how the measurements were actually made, although there are plenty of stories of that endeavour, it's about the struggle to impose a new way of measuring (the metric system) on ordinary people, and their resistance to it. It's also about how land was turned into property, Federal property in the case of the USA - which led to the biggest land sale in the history of the world.
The problem is, you see, that the traditional measures make it easy to divide things up, while the metric system makes it easy to count. Two completely different problems. In addition the traditional ways are all tuned to a human scale, while metric units can go from the very small, less than the size of an atom, to the very large distances used by astronomy. No surprise that metric was the favoured measuring system of the scientists!
The struggle started with the American Revolution - Thomas Jefferson's original proposals for the new United States included not only the creation of the dollar, the method for creating new states and how they should be surveyed, but also a new, decimal based, set of standard weights and measures. The new weights and measures proposal got mysteriously lost during the period while Jefferson was in Paris as the Minister of the United States.
The struggle, I notice, continues to this day in both the USA and the UK...
All in all an excellent read.
jQuery Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach
By B. M. Harwani, published by Apress
Cookbook/Recipe style books seem to be all the rage at the moment. Although I prefer reference books, I do find the cookbook style useful for things that I don't do very often, and this book was no exception. I would emphasize, though, that it's not a book you could really use to learn how to use the library.
jQuery is one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries and the book provides solutions to a wide range of the problems you are likely to encounter. The books starts out with the basics - selecting and using the DOM, and moves on to more complex situations from there. I found the form validation examples, and the event handling material particularly useful.
Each entry consists of a statement of the problem, followed by a solution, and then a longer or shorter explanation and discussion of how and why the solution works. The stuff I used out of the book worked just fine, with no errors. Obviously, I didn't use everything, but the quality of the code provided seemed fine to me.
I was, however, a bit disappointed by the quality of the book production. The paper it's printed on is rather low quality, and some of the fonts used in displaying sample output are reproduced in very small type, making it difficult to read. Overall the level of graphic design leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, the content manages to overcome this handicap.
I found it useful, but I suspect this is partly a matter of taste. Ten years ago I would have recommended dropping into your nearest computer bookshop and browsing through this book and the O'Reilly equivalent to see which one is more to your taste. Sadly the dominance of Amazon has ended the possibility of this sort of activity, as well as the possibility of serendipity in the finding of books you never knew existed.
C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Prentice Hall
Qt is a C++ cross platform library. It started out as a GUI library, but it has long outgrown that, and it's starting to look more and more like a comprehensive cross platform framework. It's also gaining new features very fast, which is something of a problem for any author.
None the less, this book will provide application programmers with a solid foundation when they come to use Qt. When I did a comparative review of Qt books last year, I didn't have access to this book. However, I recently used a colleague's copy at work, and found it so much more useful, and comprehensive, than my other Qt books, including the earlier edition of this book, that I bought my own copy out of my first paycheck! What better recommendation could you want?
This book is a must for those who need to use the entire framework, since it covers far more than just the GUI, including multithreading, networking (note, though, that it doesn't cover using the QNetAccessManager, which arrived after the book went to print), 3D graphics, using databases, and extending Qt programs with Javascript.
The one real weakness of the book, probably caused by the rapid development of the framework, is that the GUI material basically assumes that the reader wants to program the GUI facilities directly instead of using Designers and/or Creator. I've noticed that there is a little bit of snobbishness in the Qt community, with the old guard maintaining that the only way to work in Qt is via direct programming. Hopefully the next edition of the book will teach GUI programming via the Creator IDE, and the Designer. Lets just see if we can break the 'real programmers program in noughts and ones' attitude in parts of the community :)
So would I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly. My current job has taken me into realms of the Qt framework I've never used before, and this book enabled me to get up speed very fast under a schedule that was very, very, tight.
Highly recommended.
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