Michael Koltsov's den

Yesterday i was giving a talk summarizing all the new things i’ve learned throughout the conference. It was real fun! I put emphasis onto things i consider as the most prominent : Dart, Polymer, Dataflow. After the talk i had an interesting conversation about the future of AngularJS considering the rise of Polymer. I was a little nervous because i couldn’t see the audience, but the comments and questions were very nice.

I didn’t have enough time to prepare, so i’ve decided to include some of the slides from the conference. Here’s my presentation.

Northern Californian mood

I’m going to give a talk regarding all the new things that i’ve learned at Google IO including new changes in AngularJS, Dart, Polymer, Go. Link for attending the webinar is here –http://lnkd.in/byjANZj

Confession

Airbnb provides a meetup for its clients at SF Pride, we’re going to attend it.

Such a simple and convenient way to go from O(n) to O(logn) in a messy Symbol table

I’ve changed quite a few things on my blog and i’m going to spend much more time on it! Wish me good luck!

This book considered to be a supplement for the “JavaScript: the good parts”. It’s said in the book’s introduction that these two books shouldn’t be considered as rivals though many of theirs topics are the same. Advent of JavaScript, node.js and many cool frameworks made the prior book a bit outdated. This book promises to give you patterns how to write js code in modern and concise way .

It’s not a hipster’s book. Hipsters don’t read books, instead they teach themselves Google and treat software engineering as a topic on Stack overflow. This book is for mature software developers who know that you can’t stay content in learning technology.

As a matter of fact most of all I’ve enjoyed few last chapters of the book. Chapters about concurrency, asynchronous way of thinking and creating loops as well as chapters about functional approach to write robust programs are invaluable!

If you want to feel confidence while writing js code reading this update to “JavaScript: the good parts” is essential.

My score 5/5

May be I’m a little bit biased but functional and asynchronous approach to writing programs are two things that I try to sneak in every program that I tackle.

Long time before I thought that JavaScript is an interpreted subset of Java. These days I ‘ve been struggling a lot because of my incompetence. Many cool JS frameworks (except for jQuery which was a starting point for most of them) and Node.js made me learn JavaScript on a such level that I won’t be shy to show my code to anyone.

In the Java world there’s a book that every pragmatic developer should read , it’s Joshua Bloch’s “Effective Java”. This book has the same uplifting effect, if you would have read it. It teaches how you SHOULD write js code. After reading it I have a strong belief that JavaScript has much more common with Scala and Lisp, than it has with Java.

My score 5/5

It wasn’t obvious for me how to start learning Angular because of the flood of information about it. I needed to take off the ground an Angular-based business application as quickly as possible. I’m a book type of guy, I find it as one of the greatest pleasures to be able to learn from the books. I’ve started learning with some other book, but I ‘ve quickly got bored with it. Next was a nice Pluralsight’s screen cast that has helped me to kickstart my project a lot. Though it was a useful, I’ve needed a solid reference book to address my questions. Without further due I come to this book as a source of true Angular craftsmanship.

The book doesn’t tend to teach you the basics of the framework (which is huge). On contrary it tells you the cases and useful patterns where the framework really shines. At the same time it’s not a pray for Angular, it tells you about the drawbacks and tradeoffs that it has. As a pragmatic developer I would definitely recommend this book for those who strive to obtain a practical knowledge.

My score 4/5

This time my intention to read a book was simple, I was trying to decide if it’s worth developing for Google glass because of the limitations it imposes.

There’s a certain lack of books for the Glass explorers. The fact that this book exists is a delightful exception. The book exactly does what it promises. An ability to develop web apps for Google glass. Though there is a lot of manuals from Google to achieve such a goal, but I feel confident after reading a book that’s not affiliated with a certain vendor. Vendor’s books tend to lie, that’s the main point after years of tackling distinct API’s.

Apart from that the the book is great, it teaches you how to make it with Google glass in a succinct way. It can be easily read in a couple of days. My only issue with it was a lack of material covering the native development process for the goggles. If all you need is mirror api than this book is sufficient, but if you feel pain because of the mirror api handicaps I recommend you to find another book which covers GDK.

My score is 3/5