Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Instant jQuery 2.0 Table Manipulation How-to by Charlie Griefer is an excellent book that explains practical web development scenarios that are possible with the use of tables and jQuery, like the following:

• Table row striping 
• Sum columns 
• Show/hide rows 
• Highlighting cells 
• Pagination
• Column sorting 
• Filtering 
• Table-related jQuery Plugins (DataTables & Tablesorter)

While you'll be able to find several code samples for the above scenarios online, what really sets this book apart is the detailed explanation of the code samples. The ideas from the book can be adapted to newer scenarios.

Although it has jQuery 2.0 in the title, there is nothing specifically meant for jQuery 2.0.

The book is suitable for a beginner to intermediate level web developer audience. Some basic prior knowledge of HTML, CSS & jQuery is required to follow the content in the book. This can be a good reference to keep handy. It is a slim book with just 56 pages and I wonder if it qualifies to be called a book.

I found the book well-written, engaging & informative. I recommend it to web developers working with jQuery.

This review is based on a complimentary ebook that Packt offered me.

Labels: Book Review, jQuery

This Week I Learned:

• Azure is also a business success with annual revenue topping $1 billion. That’s $1 billion with only a 20% share of a $6 billion dollar market.
• 42% of the world’s top 1 million sites are hosted in the U.S. 97% of websites (in the Alexa top million) with a .kr ccTLD are hosted in South Korea. Google, Facebook, Amazon have millions of users in india, but no data centers in India. 
• A typeface is the specific letter-form design of an alphabet. A font is a collection of all the characters of a typeface, including capital letters and lowercase letters, numerals and punctuation marks. The words font and typeface are often interchanged. Times New Roman was Microsoft's first font and the default in most MS programs till Calibiri replaced it. Matthew Carter created the Georgia and Verdana fonts for Microsoft.
• Like the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), India has a Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In, part of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology of GoI) too which has been in operation since January 2004. It is probing into the $45 million ATM heist in which hackers broke into two card processing companies, raising the balances and withdrawal limits on accounts that were then exploited in coordinated ATM withdrawals in 28 countries around the world. The heist involved a couple of Indian companies. The CERT-In website uses frames and has disabled right-clicking on its pages (both bad practices, in my opinion). According to Defacement Statistics on the CERT-In website, there were 3419 defacements from Jan,2013 to Apr,2013 
• 146 Indian Members of Parliament have appointed relatives (family members include 60 sons and 36 wives) as their personal staff. Source: Times of India

Labels: India, TWIL

Code School  teaches web technologies via online video tutorials. While most of their courses are paid, some like the course on Chrome DevTools are free. The Chrome DevTools course is well-produced and impressive.

In my opinion, learning about DevTools within at least one browser is crucial to do a good job at web development. Some of the tricks you learn in the Code School Discover Chrome DevTools tutorial can easily be re-used with the Developer tools of other browsers (like IE, Firefox Firebug)

Like Pluralsight, Code School provides some of its courses for free:

• Try jQuery 
• Try Git 
• Try Ruby 

Labels: Browsers, Chrome, Learning Resources

Instant jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to is a beginner level book by Marcos Placona on getting started with the Gridster jQuery plugin.

Gridster is a MIT licensed jQuery plugin that allows building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns. You can even dynamically add and remove elements from the grid. It has an active following on GitHub. The minified version (jquery.gridster.min.js) of this powerful plugin  measures just 33KB. Gridster supports Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

jQuery plugins like these make building compelling website user experiences a simple task.

The plugin does come with online documentation but if you need some hand-holding and have to get up to speed quickly, this book can guide you through. The book should be read while you're trying out the six download-able code samples that come along. It is just 48 pages long and is more like a long article. This book could have been longer and clubbed as a chapter of a bigger book on useful, liberally-licensed jQuery plugins.

It is interesting to know and commendable that the publisher of this book, Packt, pays a royalty to open source projects on which the books it sells are based.

This review is based on a complimentary ebook that Packt offered me.

Labels: Book Review

I like keeping definitions of  keywords used in Microsoft technologies handy. This is a placeholder for links to online resources that have definitions.

• SharePoint 2010 Glossary - MSDN
• SharePoint 2013 Glossary - MSDN
• Azure Glossary (including SQL Database) - MSDN, Technet
• WCF Glossary - MSDN
• C# Reference - MSDN

work in progress...

Labels: Microsoft, Programming