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Book Review

Responsive Web Site Design – 1stWebDesigner – Book Review

I just finished reading Responsive Web Site Design, by Jamal Jackson.

It is a short read, which is always a big advantage. However, it only covers the subject on a cursory manner, and mostly consists of screenshots of sites and their responsive equivalents on a cell phone.

It is much more of a report than a real e-book covering the subject.

Not recommended, even at sales price.

Categories
Book Review

Delphi XE Development Essentials – Book Review

Delphi XE Development Essentials – by Bob Swart is a very good e-book covering new features in Delphi XE – as well as some new features in Delphi 2009 and even Delphi 2007.

Since most of my programming is done in Delphi 2007 and I plan to switch to XE2, I found the book quite useful.

I have been a little remiss on upgrading Delphi, mostly because since 2007 there was a complex process on the local reseller which even included sending them signed contracts in the mail. That was surprisingly worse than the very simple process from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2007 – simply accessing a site and either entering your credit card number or printing out and paying a boleto online. Thus I skipped 2 or 3 versions of Delphi.

Obviously the forced Unicode support in Delphi 2009 didn't help, as it will take a while to change applications to support it. XE2 is a bit exciting as it added 64-bit support. In most software 64-bit has no practical use at all, but I have several users that had memory problems with STG FolderPrint Plus after scanning several million files at once. This was much improved with supporting 3GB memory in 64-bit OSs a few versions back, though.

The book was quite useful, and cover a lot of ground, including Unicode support, new compiler options, new features such as attributes, generics, unit testing, code site, subversion and more.

Recommended to anyone switching from an older Delphi version, or even starting with XE. It is interesting to note that you can get it for free when you get the XE2 Development Essentials edition.

Categories
Site Reviews

Software Engineering for SaaS course Review

Just finished the Software Engineering for SaaS course on Coursera . Very good, learned a lot about Ruby, Rails, Cucumber and RSpec. Took me about 30 hours, including the book, videos, and course assignments.

One thing to note and that is mentioned everywhere is that the Ruby and Rails segments have what they call an “accelerated pace”. This is important because they really mean it! While I understood enough to keep up with the assignments, they took a lot of web searches to be completed.

Ruby is quite interesting, specially given my main language, Delphi, which is quite formal. I did a lot of web apps with it in late 90s, but Rails is very far away from it. I realized it before learning more about it, but it is incredibly easy to make some very complex stuff up in it.

I really like Cucumber – a BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) tool. It servers as documentation and automated tests at once, and it is really readable:

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Section of a Cucumber test for a site:

Feature: search for movies by director

Background: movies in database

Given the following movies exist:
| title | rating | director | release_date |
| Star Wars | PG | George Lucas | 1977-05-25 |
| Blade Runner | PG | Ridley Scott | 1982-06-25 |
| Alien | R | | 1979-05-25 |
| THX-1138 | R | George Lucas | 1971-03-11 |

Scenario: add director to existing movie
When I go to the edit page for “Alien”
And I fill in “Director” with “Ridley Scott”
And I press “Update Movie Info”
Then the director of “Alien” should be “Ridley Scott”

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There is some support code for that, but surprisingly little.

RSpec – the TDD (Test Driven Development) tool –  uses regular Ruby code, but the nature of Ruby (plus the RSpec helper functions) makes mocks and several other details incredibly easy. You can just replace method calls with mock functions, and at the same time easily control the results and check how they are called. Awesome.

The course wasn't perfect (in particular, a lot of the videos were hard to read, although they are fixing that for the next edition), but I think it was pretty good, specially for free. Recommended.