For this trip I had really been aching to finally read the acclaimed “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning title and a national bestselling book – and one I have heard quite a lot of buzz about. The back cover is filled with endorsements from such luminaries as Bill Gates, and Colin Renfrew of Nature Magazine. The book is basically about how and why the various cultures on Earth developed differently, with some acquiring technology and power, and others seemingly remaining stagnant in their development. The author tries to refute the racist assumption that some groups are inherently less intelligent because they never began using iron or developed writing of their own. He ties all this to positive-feedback loops involving geography, climate, the interplay between societies, and naturally the arrival of guns, germs, and steel.

Sounds fascinating, right? Sure it is. How can it not be? To top it all off, the author himself has had a rich and interesting life story having spent considerable time abroad living in New Guinea, with his life occasionally in peril (be it from malaria or hostile tribes), and he mixes anecdotes from his experiences into the narrative of the book.

The great thing about a book like this too is once you’ve read it, there are like thousands of people out there you can talk about it with – because the book was so popular. Because I was travelling in Panama at the time and bumping into other tourists, this turned out to be true. But something curious kept coming up in these conversations – nobody I met had actually finished the book – and this included several academics I ran into from the Smithsonian. Myself, when I got about 3/4 the way through my eyes began to droop and I stopped looking forward to the next page and chapter. I mean, seriously.. this is one boring book. Its not boring because the topic isn’t interesting, but the author really had an odd way of approaching the subject. The most striking flaw is the amount of repetition. He keeps going back to the same examples over and over to illustrate the application some new subtlety or theory – and after a while you just get really tired of hearing about it.

My point is that I found it interesting that while people were so eager to praise the book for it’s ideas, people were almost ashamed to admit they found it kindof boring and didn’t actually finish it. It certainly doesn’t necessarily follow that because the subject matter is weighty, the narrative is dry or unapproachable. I would contrast GGAS with other popular non-fiction books like Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which were both fascinating and very well written at the same time.

I wonder if Bill and Colin read the whole thing.

• All the basics (of course). Types, syntax, and all the little quirks that differentiate JavaScript from languages like Java and C#.
• Explain clearly how developers can take advantage of first-class functions, context, and various dynamic features of the language.
• How to design your programs using object-oriented patterns like inheritance, multiple inheritance, and how to use expando’s, and do things like object inspection.
• What tools you should be using to do development.
• How to avoid common performance pitfalls and how to generally speed up your applications.
• How to do wicked-awesome DHTML and CSS magic.
• How to store data offline for later retrieval.
• How to take advantage of some of the cool features in HTML 5.

About 2/3 of the book is instructional, and the rest is in-depth reference material of all standard and non-standard JavaScript objects and features (including DOM). This is complete with code examples and explanations.

If you’re learning JavaScript as a beginner and not sure if you should get this book or something more basic – get this. The first few chapters tell you everything you need to know from the perspective of somebody totally fresh to the language. If you’re an experienced developer wanting to get a desktop reference, this is for you too – but you’ll probably focus on the last 1/2 of the book.

I’m really looking forward to hearing some feedback from anyone who’s taken a look at it – good or bad. So feel free to post your thoughts if you’ve bought it and had a chance to form an opinion.

Get your copy from Amazon.

Busy Coder's Guide

The book is available in print or through Murphy’s website:  http://commonsware.com/ .   I Strongly recommend the latter for a few reasons.  Firstly Android is a [rapidly] moving target.  The website purchase allows you to download updates for a year and updates do seem to appear from time to time.  Secondly you also get access to the unfinished advanced book.  While that book is unfinished it just so happened to contain a completed chapter explaining exactly what I wanted to do.  Once your subscription runs out you still get to keep the books in pdf form.

Rather than go through an exhaustive list of the contents I’ll tell you what I’ve found useful so far.

The book has LOTS of details on android widgets and how to describe them in your layout xml’s and access them in your code.  It details some of the fancier things you can do such as dynamic list content (albeit different than my earlier posting) and an options menu api.

The book has some chapters on thread handling and application lifecycle.  I had previously spent weeks combing these details out of various message boards and mailing lists as well as pouring over the then-unclear api documentation.  These chapters would have been a big time-saver for me.

Probably the biggest deal for me is addressed in this book and continued in the advanced book:  Background Processes.  There are all sorts of different ways to set up background processes in android and all sorts of different ways to communicate them.  If you’re struggling with untangling the mystery of persistant programs in android this will be $35 well spent.

There are a couple of things that annoyed me a little about the books.  Code blocks are split up into snippet-description-snippet-description sequences so sometimes you have to put the pieces together a little.  He doesn’t always specify where the code would belong in your directory structure (please fix this one thing if you ever read this Mark).  The unorthodox naming of chapters might make it a little tough to quickly find what you’re looking for but they add a lot of character so I’m actually fine with it.  Just be prepared.

All in all the Busy Coder’s Guides are great resources and well worth the money.  I have it open on my other screen *right* now as I write this and will be using it to help put a few finishing touches on my program this afternoon

- Tyson

Audience: Beginners. A little Objective-C would be nice but not required.

What to expect: A tutorial-style introduction to iPhone development that takes very little for granted.

First of all, it’s well organized. The author begins with an excellent top-down discussion of the iPhone OS and the SDK. He also gives a quick introduction to Objective-C if you’ve never done that before. He introduces the MVC pattern, views, controllers, transitions, controls, multi-touch, events, multi-media, geolocation, and gestures.

Things I liked about this book:

• Great progression from the simple to the complex that introduces many of the important concepts in iPhone application architecture.
• Lots of complete, atomic examples.
• Nice clear writing style, although sometimes a bit brief.

Things I hope they fix in the second edition:

• This is a relatively short book – about 350 pages, and big print – too. There is a lot of room for expansion, and some subjects the author doesn’t cover in depth enough.
• I think the section on Objective-C is far too brief. As a developer who is new to the Mac platform as well as the iPhone platform, I am learning Objective-C at the same time as the iPhone SDK. I think a couple chapters at least on the basics of the language would go a long ways to improving this book.
• The book did not adequately explain device provisioning, certs, and AppID’s. You’ll have to figure this stuff out on your own by reading the material provided by Apple.
• I was disappointed the author spent no time discussing OpenGL programming on the iPhone. This seems like a fairly major subject area conspicuously overlooked.
• This book came out exactly at the same time that the iPhone SDK 3.0 went to beta, and of course doesn’t cover anything from that. Hard to criticize, but you have to admit the timing is bad. I wish O’Reilly would do something like promise people who buy the book that they’ll get a PDF of the next edition once iPhone SDK 3.0 is released.
• If they do release a second edition it should definitely cover the new Core Data API, the new mapping stuff, the push API, the general changes to the application model, and the changes to eventing and UIKit.

You can pick up a copy of this book at Amazon for $23.09.

If you would like me or Tyson to review your iPhone, Blackberry, J2ME, Android, Objective-C, JavaScript, Rails, or .NET book please just email me at alexei.white(at)gmail.com.