Will Python and Django become the next hot languages for web developers? With Google’s recent App Engine announcement the spotlight is certainly shinning bright on this scripting language and web application framework. The Atomeo blog hast a great post to get you ready for Google Apps Engine by Learning Python and Django.
Bad Smells in Code is a summary from Martin Fowler’s classic book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. We’ve all been through the process of refactoring our code. Whether it’s simply a case of cleaning up messy code, or reorganizing the structure of our application, this summary is a teaser for you to go and buy Martin’s book.
The makers of the E Text Editor have produced a nice Learning Regular Expressions Video Tutorial and Cheatsheet. Although they apply regular expressions within their text editor product, there is lots of knowledge that you can transfer to your scripting/programming endeavors.
If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to learn Ruby on Rails, I would suggest reading Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book. It is a great online introduction to the Ruby programming language and will definitely give you a kickstart while learning the Rails framework.
If you are working with Flex 2.0 on OSX and would prefer to use Textmate instead of the Flex Builder Beta, Daniel Parnell has created a Flex 2 bundle that automates the build process and a few auto-complete features.
How to be an XCoder is a free open-source book by Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin that will help you learn Objective-C with Xcode. If you have ever had any interest in writing desktop applications for OSX, this may be a good place to start.
There is a great Computer Language Shootout Benchmark web app at debian.org. You can pick your favourite programming languages and see which one is faster at a variety of common programming tasks and benchmarking algorithms. Check out this battle between PHP and Ruby!
Richard Dooling has a nice tutorial that will have you running Python on Windows XP in 7 minutes. I’ve been using a bit of Python lately for automating some tasks on an older Windows Server. I could be using the old DOS Batch language, but instead decided to look at a fully featured, all purpose scripting language.
Mastering recursive programming from IBM Developerworks is a very complete and detailed article on the often difficult concept of recursive programming. The article attempts to show how recursive programming can be an efficient method to solving tough programming patterns.
Symfony is a new web development framework much like Rails or Django except its for the PHP web scripting language. If you’d like to learn this new framework, check out their symfony advent calendar that is a set of 24 tutorials, published day-by-day between December 1st and Christmas.
