#larry ullman

[techdog]

Modern JavaScript Links, Chapter 12

URLs from Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design by Larry Ullman.

Chapter 12, Error Management

Unit Testing

http://github.com/atesgoral/jsunity

http://pivotal.github.com/jasmine/

http://docs.seleniumhq.org/

Testing on Multiple Browsers

Tutti

Yeti, part of YUI

TestSwarm

JsTestDriver

SeleniumHQ

Dromaeo

JSLint

[blackblood]

so I finally bought my programming textbook- I was supposed to buy it like three weeks ago- but anyways the author put his own comments in parenthesis. Here's a quote:

"The the greater detriment of the Web, Javascript was used to create alerts (shudder), pop up windows (ugh), and playing audio files (please don't)."

And also:

"While the user is doing stuff inside the browser, events are triggered. These events can be handled by Javascript asynchronously, meaning that Javascript can do its thing in the back ground"

It sounds like a teenage girl wrote the book, not a middle aged bald guy named Larry.

[lifeandcode]

Review: Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web: A Beginner's Beginner Guide

Want to find a beginner's guide to programming that really works for beginners?  I know there's more than one -- but here's one that I know from firsthand experience really works. 

Review: Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web

It can be difficult for novices to find the right starting point when they want to learn to code.   Many "beginner" books are in fact "for people who are beginners at THIS programming language" not for "people who are beginners at ANY programming language."  

It can be pretty discouraging to pick up a "beginner" book only to realize you don't understand a word of it, no?

Before this book, I pushed my way through a number of others, and about half the time I was typing on blind faith -- I didn't always understand what I was typing; I just typed in the hopes that it would eventually become clear.  

Sometimes it did.  Sometimes it didn't.  I learned some stuff from those books, but I wouldn't describe it as an ideal pedagogical experience. 

I can say without reservation that Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web is a beginner's beginner book -- it goes through basic programming concepts cleanly and simply, chapters build upon one another, and it doesn't depend on the reader to already have experiences with concepts like "object oriented programming" or Model-View-Controller.  It's simple, straight-ahead code that demonstrates the basics, like loops, putting stuff in a database and getting it back out, pattern matching with regular expressions, and more.  

As another measure of the book's quality, all the example code actually worked (you'd be surprised how often the example code you can download with many books doesn't actually work.  If you're a beginner, you're likely to think the problem is between chair and keyboard even on the rare occasions that it isn't). 

Another problem with beginner books is this: if they're not baffling you with decidedly un-beginner material, they drop you off far short of where you'd like to be, namely, making cool stuff and putting it on the interwebs.  At the end of this book, I could actually put simple useful stuff on the web with the things I learned in this book. Nonetheless, I don't really want to stop there.  The good news is that this book is part of a series of three books of graduating levels of difficulty.  I already own the next book in the series, PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites, and I'll be moving on to that next.