Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

AngularJS: Get Started is a beginner level three hour video course by Scott Allen that currently tops the list of popular courses on Pluralsight, a subscription-based video tutorial site. I enjoyed the course as there were practical samples I could try along while watching the videos. I highly recommend it to anyone getting started with AngularJS. Experts on a topic are generally under the curse of knowledge. They know so much about a subject that they cannot explain it to their grandmother in simple terms. Scott Allen is a great teacher though. He simplified the topics and applied it to real-world scenarios. He provided adequate background (Revealing Module pattern, Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE), pronounced iffy) before setting out to explain progressively more complex AngularJS topics. The course material was well-organized. Thanks to him, I got to try out Plunkr , the online code editor (it's open source & IMO more feature rich than JSBin & JSFidd...

The English language is notoriously tricky with its use of more than 19 sounds represented by 5 vowels (and sometimes “y”). Quirky words with silent letters and extra letters seem to  trip a lot of us . Aphonetic is a term a member of the English Stack Exchange forum uses to describe words whose pronunciation bears no relationship to their spelling .  These strangely pronounced aphonetic words can be troublesome as those unfamiliar with these words would be unable to guess how to pronounce them just by looking at the spelling. For example, "colonel" is pronounced as ker-nil while "gaol" is pronounced  as  jeyl . Using the trick of having  Google Spreadsheet act as a read-only database , I maintain the word list in Google Sheets & use Google Sheets API to display it through JavaScript & a web front-end.  Check it out !  Update [26-Aug-2021] : The original code relied on Google Sheet API v3 which has been retired in August 2021 and ther...

Compared to last year, Microsoft Virtual Academy is now buzzing with great new content especially on open source technologies. Here's a list of courses offered on open source tech: -  Introduction to Programming with Python -  Building Responsive UI with Bootstrap -  Building Apps with Node.js Jump Start -  Introduction to jQuery -  Single Page Applications with jQuery and AngularJS -  JavaScript Fundamentals for Absolute Beginners -  Open Source Questions Answered -  Mobile Web Application Development -  The Modern Web Platform Jump Start -  HTML5 & CSS3 Fundamentals: Development for Absolute Beginners I like that they now show the date on which a course was published. Due to the evolving nature of the products, the courses can go stale due to dramatic changes in newer versions and watching out for the date of publication helps in deciding if a particular course is right for you.  I wish the page...

I'm a book lover and I have a size-able collection of books, many of which I've left incomplete or unread. To save on storage space, I've been buying ebooks & Kindle books. While learning AngularJS, I thought I should build a webpage to track the books I have as they are in scattered & in different formats. Having discovered that data stored in a table in Google Spreadsheet can be exposed as a JSON feed, I'll being using that as my back-end . I'll keep adding or deleting books and it will reflect on the web page instantaneously. The table to store my books has just 2 columns - the book name (cell A1: bookname) & Amazon's unique identifier for the book, ASIN (cell B1: asin). I use the ASIN to generate an image for the book as well as append my affiliate id to that book's page on Amazon. Here's how the finished page looks now (with a small set of my books). Evidently, there is some work left to do with the CSS. The entire page is less ...