• Programming Languages->Java->Libraries
• Enterprise Information System->Architecture
• Data Modeling & Software Engineering->Data Modeling

理想

 

 

ISBN: 0735712018, MODE: READ

I am a man with some sort of curiosity and ambition. When I started to surf the web in 1997, I believed that one day i could have my own web sites. My first static web site was born in 1998 with the help from one of my best friends - Raymond Yuan. Later on, i learned UNIX shell, C & PHP programming and created dozens of dynamic web pages. It is easy to create a web site, but maintenance is definitely not an easy job. To me, the following are big challenges for web development:

• Screen resolutions - different visitors might use different resolution settings. There is no perfect solution. - IBM.com limits the width of web pages to 760 pixels, while Microsoft.com uses all the available horizontal space.
  
• Web browsers - web pages may look and behave differently on different browsers. Always perform enought compatibility test.
  

Although I have always been using plain and old HTML syntax, i do consider to take advantage of new web stardards like XML. Jeffrey Zeldman's 'Designing with web standards' reassures me the importance of developing web sites complying with widely adopted web standards. Without standards, you are going to be obsolete. By properly using the right technology like XHTML & CSS, you can reduce the maintenance cost and improve browser compatibility level.

This book provides a good guide for you to find the right standards/technologies in order to create maintainable web sites with high browser compatibility. Unfortunately, it does not cover each standard in details.  

If you are going to create a new web site or to revamp an existing web site, you might consider the following technologies suggested by Zeldman:

• XHTML
• CSS
• DOM

Before you adopt any web standard, do check the standard compatibility level of the popular browsers. Unfortunately, this book never gives such information. Anyway, i found two good web pages on this: Wikipedia & http://nanobox.chipx86.com/browser_support.php

ISBN: 083844850X, MODE: READ

20th Century American Short Stories – An Anthology

非常棒的英文短篇小说集. 认为中文作家太dogmatic? 你将会在这里开阔你的眼界. 我最喜欢Pam Houston的 “A Blizzard Under Blue Sky”, 看她把如何把冰雪世界描写 – ‘[It] stopped being simply white and became translucent, hinting at other colors, reflections of purples and blues and grays …’.

在读小说的时候, 我会很注意看作者的简历, 譬如这个“A Blizzard Under Blue Sky”是时尚杂志Elle的编辑, 还业余做river guide和hunting guide. Arthur C. Clarke辞去了他安分的工作, 加入了英国皇家空军参加了第二次世界大战, 自学了数学和电子, 后来成了有名的科普/幻作家. 再看看我们那些中国文人, 一般都是科班出身, 自己一直局限在’文学’的圈子里, 从来不会去主动的去突破(上山下乡那绝对不是他们自己选择的). 因为他们的人生经历太少 – 了解科学普遍少, 没有勇气去探索自然 – 于是整天在家里看书, 闭门造车. 最终我们看到了晦涩的’文学’作品. 这也从侧面联系到了为什么中国哲学是以道德和伦理为基础, 而西方哲学是以科学和实践为基础. 哪个更能发掘问题的实质呢?　仁者见仁.

ISBN: 1584503203, MODE: READ

Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

This book is a good guide for small business to adopt open source software. Opensourcesmall.biz

CRM –

Commercial – ACT! & ColdMine – very popular in the US, especially among sales people.

Open source – Gnubis | Customer Touch CRM | GuanxiCRM | Anteil/Retrieve CRM (opensourcesmall.biz/crm) | Tip: it is a good idea to put the contact information in LDAP.

Calendar & Schedule management

Mozilla Calendar | JPilot (linux) | WebCalendar | PHPGroupWare | Ximian Evolution (good) | OpenGroupware | tip: Synch to PDA is considered as a very important feature.

Document Control

Revision Control System | Microsoft Visual SourceSafe | CVS | Perforce (comm. Best of breed) | Subversion

Financial Management

Quicken (Single-entry) | GnuCash | QuickBooks | Aria | SQL Ledger | Peachtree | Great Plains

ERP

Compiere | OpenMFG | GNU Enterprise

Payment Processing

Paypal.com | 2checkout.com

Online store hosting

Ebay.com | smallbusiness.yahoo.com | kagi.com | miva.com | oscommerce.org

Backup software

Amanda | Mondo Archive |

Spam Filters

SpamAssassin | Popfile | SpamBayes | Dspam | Bogofilter | SpamNet | TMDA

ISBN: 0596005814, MODE: READ

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing

Are you using any software licensed open source? This book goes through all popular open source licenses paragraph by paragraph and points out what you can do and can not do.

Things are most useful to me: 1) MIT/BSD/Apache/Academic Free License – are more open that other open source licenses; you can use them in any kind of software provided you obey some obligation specified in the licenses; 2) GPL/LGPL/Mozilla licenses are quite restrictive. You must license you software in GPL if your software depends on any GPL library; You can use software licensed in LGPL in software licensed differently from GPL or LGPL. 3) If you need to design a license agreement for your software to be distributed to the end users, read Ch.5 – classic proprietary license.

ISBN: 0321127420, MODE: FUTURE

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Designing a some kind of framework? You definitely to take a look at this book regardless the language you are using. Note this book should be used as a reference other than a guide (Many of the patterns Martin shows us have a lot of dependency on the platform you are using to implement the application. For instance, if you use Microsoft's .NET platform, you are going to be leaning towards a Table Module instead of a Domain Model).

Note:

From now on, I will post all the books – those that I am reading now; and those I saw in the library and thought which might be a great help in the future – in this blog. The MODE reflects my reading status of the book: FUTURE – will consider to read it in the future; READ: I already read it or I am reading it.

The format: First line is the ISBN – in the future, I will design some converter to convert the content of this blog from HTML to PDF. During the conversion, I will retrieve the book cover image from Amazon.com and ISBN will be the ‘key’.

Writing For Emotional Balance: A Guided Journal To Help You Manage Overwhelming Emotions

越来越多的临床医学专家和保健专家推荐用写作的方法来让人们了解自己的生活状况和相应的情绪状态. 为什么呢? 作者解释, 经常写作能帮我们了解情绪的主观本性 (the subjective nature of emotions) 和情绪如何受时间和记忆的影响, 从而我们能正确的定义和评价情绪, 了解自己情绪变化规律, 整理自己的生活情绪 ...

Amazon有售.

-- 前天听News Radio 93.8得来的, 想去书局看看