Top 5 must read books for a programmer
1. Mythical man month Frederick P Brooks – This classic book looks at the human elements of software engineering. I know some of you will scream, “not this book again!”. But this is a must read book if you are a programmer and many of the conclusions in the book are still very valid after all these years.
2. The pragmatic programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas – This book explores the “apprentice” way of becoming a master programmer. I found this very informative look at programmer evolution.
3. Code Complete by Steve McConnell – An instructive book on programming by a Microsoft engineer. But there is nothing specific about Microsoft in this. It is a pleasure to read this book and you will find yourself reading it again and again.
4. Object-Oriented Software Construction, Second Edition by Bertrand Meyer – This book is a complete reference on the object oriented software design. I don’t think there is any other exhaustive book on the object oriented topic. Only drawback is that this book is too academic. Still a must have item for a programmer.
5. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software – This is a gold mine of programming wisdom. But you need some solid coding experience before you can appreciate this book. Don’t just memorize the pattern names in the book, but try to understand the real motivation for each of the patterns presented in this book.
Dreamhost enables cron jobs on Web panel
Dreamhost is a good hosting service and I have been using it for a while (not this site). One of the cool features of dreamhost account is the ability to create scheduled cron jobs using a shell account. This required a bit of “linux” knowledge like using the command “crontab -e”.
Not anymore! Dreamhost panel now contains an option to setup cron jobs directly. Check out the following screenshot from the Web panel,
But it is not perfect yet. One problem I came across is that the jobs setup using “crontab -e” doesn’t appear on the Web panel.
Osho on the versatility of the word f_ck
Check out the following hilarious video in which Osho explores the various aspects of the word “f_ck”. You may not give a “f_ck” about his movement, but this video is worth your time!
“one of the most interesting words in English is the word “f_ck”. It is a magical word…”
Pligg 9.5 beta released
If you are using Pligg to run your own Digg like site, you would have already noticed that it is painfully slow. I have been running Pligg on a shared hosting and it was killing everything else even with a small user base! It seems that Pligg team is beginning to address the performance issues in the latest beta version released yesterday.
Here are some of the key new features in Pligg 9.5,
1. Un-vote – Now users can un-vote stories they have voted for
2. Fixes for IIS – Fixes for the IIS cookie redirect bug.
3. Image upload module – Upload images and use the thickbox javascript library to view them.
4. Reporting/Burying Stories – Users can bury stories that are spam, inaccurate etc etc. Burying a story grays it out to signify you have buried it.
5. Major database query enhancements – A quick estimation shows that the database calls in version 9.1 was 170+ and now it’s 50-60. This should substantially increase the speed of your Pligg site.
6. Story page tabs – Each story page now uses tabs. There are 3 tabs, comments, who voted, and a new feature, related stories.
7. Upgrade to Template Lite 2.1 – Upgraded Pligg to the current version of Template Lite.
8. Upgrade to ezSQL 2.03 – upgraded to the latest version of ezSQL for better mysql query handling.