Starglider Systems Blog

The Art of Readable Code – Simple and Practical Techniques for Writing Better Code – by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher – is a book on advice on making your code more readable. Why would you want your code to be more readable? It might not seem so important while you are coding, specially if [...]

The Developer’s Code – What Real Programmers Do – by Ka Wai Cheung is supposed to contain “nuggets of wisdow” on how to sustain a healthy relationship with your work. Overall, I found a few interesting tidbits on the whole thing. It is a relatively pleasant read and worth the time to read it and [...]

Killer Headlines for Web Content, by Nick Osborne is an e-book by WordTracker. It is more of a report than a book, at 65 pages. This is a problem in the sense that it limits the amount of content it covers, but it also makes it a quick read. The book proposes to cover a [...]

Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout – by Eric Meyer covers a number of techniques, tools, tips and tricks on using CSS. The book is very clear about the level of the reader – advanced beginner to intermediate. If you are really advanced, you will probably know about most tricks, and if you are [...]

I have just finished reading Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web by Lukas Mathis. The book covers how to create applications and web sites that people can use and love. As an application developer, that was my main focus when reading, although many insights also cover my (right now very [...]

Article marketing is now horribly popular, to the point that Google had updates to specially tame article directories and content farms. Of course, that happened because articles are an easy way to get links to your site, as well as get content to Adsense sites. You have probably noticed that the average quality of those [...]

Save the Pixel is a web design book by Ben Hunt. I recently read and reviewed another book by him, Convert! . Save the Pixel is all about minimalist web design, thus the name. One of the principles repeated over and over is that you should not waste screen space – and most importantly, the [...]

I’ve just finished reading Convert!: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion – by Ben Hunt. The book covers many ways to improve your traffic – and most importantly – how to improve the conversion rate you get from that traffic. The book is divided in two parts. The first part is Designing for [...]

I’ve just finished reading HTML 5 and CSS 3: Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today, by Brian P. Hogan. The purpose of the book is showing how to use features on HTML 5 and CSS 3, today. Given how uneven adoption has been in various browsers (specially IE), a big part of this is providing fallbacks [...]

I’ve bought many e-books over the years at the Pragmatic Bookshelf. One neat feature I haven’t noticed till today is that now they can deliver your e-books to your Kindle with wi-fi. It’s a small touch, but downloading the e-book (not only the first time, but on every update), getting your Kindle, connecting it, finding [...]