Pure Nexus was the best thing that has happened to my tablet & phone since the moment that I’ve rooted them. It retains the pure Nexus experience, but dissolves all the unnecessary crap that Google tends to install on its “flagman” phones.
After installing it memory consumption has significantly dropped as well as battery life improvement has been obtained. All the necessary widgets I got used to are already there pre-installed, so it has helped me to get rid of some stuff I was struggling to take with me on every phone (i. e. yahoo weather widget).
I set a goal to start being productive with React & its ecosystem throughout a week. As the goal was set I had to find out what will be the best approach to achieve it. Trying to comprehend all these Fluxes, Reduxes & Immutable. JS through a course of a couple of days seemed impossible to me. Since I’m usually a book-type of guy, at first I’ve decided to read a book … and then BOOM … i’m a seasoned React pro.
To make a long story short, that didn’t happen. This book can definitely help you to comprehend the basics of using a new framework, but these days it’s not sufficient due to so called “Javascript fatigue”, which can be described in simple terms as a never ending flood of JS-frameworks & libraries you need to learn to comprehend a recently written webapp.
The book is good for beginners, for whom it might be their first introduction to the world of modern apps. Learning the basics didn’t give me much since React has a pretty lean learning curve, which doesn’t require anything but any knowledge of Javascript.
The thing that gave me a lot of pain was Redux, which is de-facto standard in writing React apps these days. Unfortunately the book doesn’t contain much about it apart from its mentioning as well as a link to a Github repo with an app written with Redux in mind.
This manual has helped me more, but to be fair, it’s dedicated to Redux(however, it also explains most of the essential React basics you’d need to be productive). I also reckon that it’s much more lengthier than the reviewed book.
As a Scala developer I find React + Redux very exciting. It’s hard to overestimate how important it is to base front-end apps on robust architecture, which Redux+React helps you to do by obliging you to use some of the best glimpses of Functional programming.
Although I would not recommend this book as a one-weekend read I can definitely say that the book is one of the most convenient, well-written and detailed technical books dedicated to one particular technology I’ve ever seen.
You can start small, read a couple of first chapters and you’d be good to go using it everyday without any problems at all. But if you’ll dedicate a bit more time into reading it and executing tons of examples that come with it you’ll become a die-hard Elasticsearch professional without you even noticing that =)
As I’ve said the book is very well written, although some parts of it are a bit outdated which definitely adds more sense to try to run the examples by yourself in order to check whether they work on current release or not.
Alvin Alexander has such a nice blog that almost anyone who has a question that has something to do with Scala will definitely end up getting to his website at least once.
I’ve decided to give his book a try and i didn’t get disappointed. First I thought I would skim through it in a couple of hours due to relatively easy concepts and redundant information that I might have known before. Unfortunately (luckily?), that didn’t happen.
The book is slightly outdated (who needs Scalatra or pure lift-JSON these days?), though delivers a lot of useful concepts that I’ve happily put under my belt.
My score 4/5
It needs to be updated + I’d like to remove a lot of worthless water that’s poured upon you here and there in the “Discussion” parts of every chapter.
Unfortunately, this was not the first book on Scala I’ve read. I wish it was. I also wish that such book for Java would have existed. It provides an inflaming mix of language insights and easy to digest basics of the language. It makes you strive to learn more about the language. It doesn’t provide all you might need for securing a 9 to 5 Scala position after you’ve read it, but it doesn’t even try to be the most comprehensive book of all that are available since it hasn’t been updated for 6 years now. It’s funny to find out that almost 6 years ago XML was as huge as Swing that are considered as outcasts of the past now. A chapter that is solely dedicated to XML? It’s not that fun if taking into account that the built-in feature for working with XML was considered a huge advantage at the time when Scala was conceived.
I like this book, even though it’s not so relevant now it’s still one of the best all-in-one Scala books that are available on the market.
I noticed today that without any notice all my files that I stored in Dropbox account are gone. I’ve been using this service for 7 years.
If I’ll leave all the sentiment aside, I was very satisfied with the functionality that Dropbox provided me for free through all these years.
Unfortunately, it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend. Dropbox is not safe anymore to store all my books and collection of cat photos. It’s time to take a dusty 1TB HDD from the darkest corner of my closet, brush it up a bit and start using it for back up again.
As I usually do, I made a specific task for myself: learn how to use Apache Kafka efficiently during the weekend. Since I’m a book kind of guy I decided that I need to read a book first before writing any code.
This book is an obvious choice since it’s been recently re-edited and seems to be the only Kafka-related book at the moment. So why not? I decided to give it a try. 1 book – 1 weekend, what could possibly go wrong?
The first red flag for me was the fact that all the code examples are in Java. How so? Kafka seemed to be an agnostic technology with APIs for both Scala & Java. This might be just a matter of author’s personal preference. The next red flag was that the code examples are very similar to what is given in official documentation. Nevertheless, i decided to read the book. Thanks to my subscription to Safari Books online library i didn’t have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, my first impression was right. The book is nothing more than a couple of blog posts contained under a hard cover. Technical details that I utterly needed were not given, instead a lot of Javadocs have been copy-pasted all-around. Code examples are too generic to have any value in them.
Frankly, this video has provided much more than all time i’ve spent reading the book.
This book is still a work in progress, therefore you can freely read it and contribute through Github.
From my point of view, this book should be considered not more than a manual listing most of the features of ECMAscript 2015 with examples. It’s not yet finished, but imho i doubt that it will be more than a list of features.
On the other side, it can save you a lot of time if you’re looking for one place to get familiarized with most of the new constructions that were added to JS recently and you’re not in a mood to chase a lot of blog posts dispersed throughout the Internet.
My score (book is still 60% complete, hence this is not a final score) 3/5
I set a goal to start being productive with React & its ecosystem throughout a week. As the goal was set I had to find out what will be the best approach to achieve it. Trying to comprehend all these Fluxes, Reduxes & Immutable. JS through a course of a couple of days seemed impossible to me. Since I’m usually a book-type of guy, at first I’ve decided to read a book … and then BOOM … i’m a seasoned React pro. 
Although I would not recommend this book as a one-weekend read I can definitely say that the book is one of the most convenient, well-written and detailed technical books dedicated to one particular technology I’ve ever seen.
r has such a nice blog that almost anyone who has a question that has something to do with Scala will definitely end up getting to his website at least once.
is was not the first book on Scala I’ve read. I wish it was. I also wish that such book for Java would have existed. It provides an inflaming mix of language insights and easy to digest basics of the language. It makes you strive to learn more about the language. It doesn’t provide all you might need for securing a 9 to 5 Scala position after you’ve read it, but it doesn’t even try to be the most comprehensive book of all that are available since it hasn’t been updated for 6 years now. It’s funny to find out that almost 6 years ago XML was as huge as Swing that are considered as outcasts of the past now. A chapter that is solely dedicated to XML? It’s not that fun if taking into account that the built-in feature for working with XML was considered a huge advantage at the time when Scala was conceived.
This book is still a work in progress, therefore you can freely read it and contribute through Github.