Free Programming Windows Phone 7 Book

Veteran's Day today – Thank you to all who have served to protect us.

Charles Petzold has releases a free e-book: Programming Windows Phone 7. I have barely opened the book so far but I am having flashbacks to my first Windows 3.1 programming experience and clinging to his Programming Windows 3.1 book for survival…I'm tempted to dig through the boxes in my basement to find my copy and reread it's the hello world example!

You can find it at his site: http://www.charlespetzold.com/phone/index.html or from Microsoft

"Practical Liferay" Book Review

Practical Liferay is a non-technical book that explains the capabilities of Liferay and how to create a portal using its out-of-the- box components. It provides an idiots introduction to what a portal is and then takes you through the various admin screens and how to use the applications/portlets available. It does not discuss how to develop portlets and just briefly mentions how to extend Liferay with hooks.

I don't recommend this book because:

1. Already outdated – Although the book was published in 2009, it covers Liferay version 5.1 and there are already 2 newer releases (5.2 and 6.0) available. There are enough differences between the versions that make the step by step instructions useless.
2. No depth – The book provides little insight into the design or features of the Liferay that you can't pick up by exploring Liferay itself.

I think this is more equivalent to a Liferay for dummies and suited more for non-technical administrator who wants step by step instructions on getting a portal setup – of course it doesn't cover how to do this end to end. I would recommend starting with the guides Liferay provides: the Liferay administration guide and development guides.

"The Quick Python Book" Book Review

I have had no previous experience with Python so when I received a copy of the I was eager to jump in and learn something. This book is focused on the Python 3 language and is written for programmers who already know another language (mainly Java or C++). At around 300 pages it is a fairly quick read and seems to hit all the basics and touches on some of the more advanced language features. Since it assumes readers already know how to program it doesn't spend any time teaching the fundamentals of development so that you can focus on Python from the beginning.

The book contains 24 chapters that are split into 4 sections: 1) Starting out, 2) The Essentials 3) Advanced Language Features 4) Where can you go from here.

Since I am not currently planning a project with Python, I probably got the most out of Part 1. Its 3 chapters give a good overview of the language constructs, and what it does and doesn't do well. This is what I was looking to get out of the book and it provided most of what I wanted in about 20-30 minutes of reading. After reading this book I feel like I have a beginner's grasp of the language and could bumble around and create some useful scripts but definitely not any sort of worthy application. If I ever need to develop an application in Python I would have to get an additional resource (and reread this one).

Carolina Code Camp

I attended Carolina Code Camp on Saturday (May 15^th) in Mathews North Carolina. The camp had 9 conferences and approximately 45 sessions of which I attended:

• Introduction to Functional Programming with Scheme
• C# Ninjitsu
• Advanced WPF-Model-View-ViewModel Apps
• Silverlight on MEF
• Become an rX Pusher with the reactive Framework

A very good geek day and I came away with a couple of books:

• Advanced MVVM by Josh Smith
• Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises