Introduction to Ruby for Mac OS X : The Principle of Least Surprise by Jim Menard

This course is from The University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, and is the complete video recording of lectures in progress. It is free to download to everyone everywhere regardless of whether you have an iTunes store account or not. I have gone through 25 out of 46 available lectures till now and I find it really excellent with the tutor keeping the students very interested in the stuff being taught while maintaining a real interactive note throughout. The image below describes the course in full.

Click on the image to view it in full size.

An article from InfoWorld, not just blatant fanboyism but an analysis supported by solid ground. Read “Why developers prefer Macs“.

If a problem can be divided into separate and unrelated parts , those parts can be run separately. That way, The problem is solved faster than if each part is run sequentially from the computer. This approach is known as parallel processing (doing more than one task in parallel to another). Now multi-core processors in a computer can perform this processing very easily.

But true parallel processing is very difficult to achieve. Many tasks have some kind of relationship with one another and can not be easily separated. Object oriented programming helps here because processing for a single object can be separated out from that for the others.

I found this very interesting paper written by ‘Boleslaw K Szymanski and Charles D Norton‘ titled Object Oriented Programming in Parallel Scientific Computing - An Overview of the Special Issue which you can read here. It really explains the topic a lot in detail.

This guide is for keeping a consistency and code manageability in the open source projects developed by Google using C++.  As explained in the guide:

C++ is the main development language used by many of Google’s open-source projects. As every C++ programmer knows, the language has many powerful features, but this power brings with it complexity, which in turn can make code more bug-prone and harder to read and maintain.

The goal of this guide is to manage this complexity by describing in detail the dos and don’ts of writing C++ code. These rules exist to keep the code base manageable while still allowing coders to use C++ language features productively.

This guide also serves the purpose of making the beginners understand the language’s conventions. Read the full guide here.

Koders.com is a leading open source code search engine from Black Duck Software. It enables software developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects posted at hundreds of open source repositories.

These guys have a really cool plugin for Visual Studio IDE that lets the developer search for code directly within the IDE without the need of a browser. What’s even more exciting is that as a developer types in the terms, the plugin performs a SmartSearch in the background, identifies results based on the term, and displays them right in the IDE. To further learn about how the SmartSearch works, watch this demonstration video.

You can get the Koders plugin for Visual studio here.

Problem solving while programming, using object oriented design always starts with the questions like:

1. What Objects should be created to solve this problem?

For example, if we are making a project for arranging books in a library, then the objects that come to mind will be the books, the shelves we keep them in, inventory book, the catalog etc.

2. What are the properties of the object?

A property is something that defines the characteristics of the object. In our problem, a few properties are, the subject the book is based on, its author, the number of books a shelf can hold in, (more…)

This is one of my favorite song of all time, Open Your Eyes by Snow Patrol. I first heard it in the pilot episode of a NBC show “The Black Donnellys”. Pity that show was canceled mid season although it was really brilliant. Here’s the music video of the song.

Get this song from iTunes here.

All this feels strange and untrue
And I won’t waste a minute without you
My bones ache, my skin feels cold
And I’m getting so tired and so old

(more…)

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Microsoft today revealed details of Visual Studio 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) and .NET framework 4.0. This next generation ‘Integrated Development Environment’ focuses on the following five points as given in the Visual Studio 2010 webpage.

• Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
• Enabling emerging trends
• Inspiring developer delight
• Riding the next generation platform wave
• Breakthrough Departmental Applications

In related news, Scott Guthrie yesterday announced on his blog that from now on  jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (including jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation). This is a real exciting news since jQuery is a great lightweight library for Javascript, widely used by developers.

Apple Developer Connection has this must read article, which is for everyone who is beginning to work with Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Leopard.