Programming Video Courses

December 4, 2011

I’ve recently come across a couple of free, public programming courses, as a series of videos, that may be of interest to those of you out there (I haven’t had the time to view many of the individual episodes, but they look promising).

The first is an Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, from an instructor at MIT. It’s definitely for beginners and although it uses Python as its primary language, the goal is to convey the fundamentals and the theories involved. It probably gets a bit too high-end for some, but worth taking a gander at regardless.

The second series is programming literacy’s Core units. This series is much more broad and covers a range of languages and topics. As I write this, the first six units have been completed and are available as YouTube videos, with downloadable PDFs (and other formats) for the slides and notes. On the other hand, the last one was finished about 20 months ago, so there may never be more in the series. Still, it’s approachable and I like that the materials are available for viewing separately. And the price is right!

In C and C++, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Web Development ,
permalink

Columbia’s Break Writing Series

November 29, 2011

Columbia University has a BreakWriting program that encourages students to write during their December-January semester break. Last year’s series of 16 posts have been put online and are well worth reading if you do any writing (or think about doing any). Each posting has oodles of useful, real-world advice, with plenty of tips and recommendations for being as successful as possible when it comes to writing (success here being measured in terms of actually writing, not commercial success).

In Uncategorized
permalink

CSS Resources

November 22, 2011

Someone, I forget whom, shared with me these two good CSS resources, and I thought I’d pass them along. The first is Make CSS3 Buttons That Are Extremely Fancy and the article explains exactly that. I’m not a graphics person, so being able to do something using only CSS is great for me (and being told exactly what to do is even better). A benefit of CSS buttons is that the user does not have to download the additional resources of all those extra images, especially when you factor in images for different states (hover et al.).

The other resource is ProCSSor, a CSS prettifier. It’s just a utility that you can drop a slew of CSS into and it will clean it up as you’d like. It will even work on CSS in an uploaded file or located on a provided URL.

In Web Development ,
permalink

What Is Larry Thinking? #47 => Random Monkey Appearances

November 20, 2011

In this edition…

Continue Reading…

In Flex, JavaScript, Web Development , , , , ,
permalink

Adobe’s Significant Flash and Flex Changes

November 17, 2011

Last week, or thereabouts, Adobe announced that it was discontinuing support for Flash on mobile devices. This is, by all accounts, a wave of the white flag in Adobe’s battle against Apple and its iOS devices (if only Steve Jobs were alive today to celebrate). I didn’t think too much of that decision: it does make sense to use HTML5 or native apps for dynamic content to be run on mobile devices anyway. And Flash would still continue to run on desktops, where something like 99% of browsers have the plug-in and 90-some% of video is run through Flash. Flash is such a large component of Adobe’s various technologies that I can’t imagine Adobe leaving it behind.

And then Adobe announced today that it was offering Flex to the Apache Software Foundation (managers of the ubiquitous Apache Web server, among other projects).  Apache will need to vote on whether to accept Flex or not. This announcement does surprise me, as Flex is used not only for Flash creation, but also desktop and mobile application development via the AIR platform. Adobe says it will continue to support Flash and Flex, but clearly Adobe is moving more towards HTML5.

An interesting, and rather big, development. One does not normally think of a technology with such a large market share being outright dropped. We shall see how this plays out…

In Flex, Web Development ,
permalink