Phlogiston Blue

This is Alan Lenton's web site.

I am ibgames' Chief Technology Officer and game designer. I designed and programmed Federation, an economic themed massively multi-player game, and one of the longest running online games of all time. Although I'm currently working as technical team lead at Digital Governance, I still develop Federation - now in its 21st year.

The Bookworm - Carl Spitzweg - a suitable illustration for Alan Lenton's website

My web site contains pieces I've written, talks I've given, reviews of books I've read, and information about things I'm interested in. Like me, it's somewhat chaotic, but if you dig around a little you will, I hope, find some interesting material. Most of the stuff on the site is written for the non-specialist; if you find something that isn't very clear drop me a line and I'll try to clarify things. The address to write to is alan@ibgames.com and if you include the word 'fed2' in the subject line my spam filter will pass it by on the other side and not junk it!

I also produce a free weekly newsletter, called Winding Down, which features information, reviews, and analysis on computers, the Internet and society. It's available via an e-mail list, and you can get the subscription details here.

You can find more detailed information about me here.

Recent Reading:

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.


More Recent Reading

Aspects of Developing with, and Using, Open Source Software

Computers and Society

Crystal Falls

Notes for a history of online games

Reviews: books and software

Technical Topics

Winding Down

About Alan Lenton


If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email.