Do you know why experienced Ruby programmers tend to reach for basic collections and hashes while programmers from other languages go for more specialized classes? Do you know the difference between strip, chop, and chomp, and why there are three such similar methods when apparently one might suffice? (Not to mention lstrip and...

In 1862, the gardener James Bateman sent several specimens of the Christmas orchid to Charles Darwin. This orchid was first planted in Britain in 1855 and it did not blossom until 1857. It had been discovered several decades before by the French botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars in Madagascar in 1822. The most significant...

Don’t be fooled: Just because the Droid 2 is a smartphone doesn’t mean that it’s harboring some form of insidious intelligence. There’s no alien brain in the device. It isn’t going to take over the world, though it can intimidate you — that is, until you understand and accept that it’s your...

CSS3, the newest version of the style sheet language of the web, is less about creating new effects and more about accomplishing the beautiful web design effects you’re familiar with in fantastic new ways—ways that are more efficient and produce more usable and flexible results than the techniques we’ve been using...

Many years ago, when I had to learn C overnight to make a living as a programmer (this was before C++), I would have given half my salary to find a mentor, a person would say, “Here are the potholes in the road...errors that you are sure to make in learning C. And here’s how to steer around them.” Instead, I had to...

But the task of documenting and teaching a technology such as AppleScript is daunting (especially while you’re employed at a busy company like Apple), and it could not have been accomplished without the...

We were early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP), testing on XP teams that weren’t at all sure where testers or their brand of testing fit in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the agile (which wasn’t called agile yet) literature about acceptance testing, or how professional testers might contribute. We learned not...

Mainstream data mining techniques significantly limit the role of human reasoning and insight. Likewise, in data visualization, the role of computational analysis is relatively small. The power demonstrated individually by these approaches to knowledge discovery suggests that somehow uniting the two could lead to increased efficiency and more...

In the last few years SharePoint has taken the world by storm. In fact, the product is one of the fastest growing products in the history of Microsoft. Companies of all sizes are rapidly implementing SharePoint and moving it to the center of their organization. The interesting thing about SharePoint, however, is that if you ask ten...

The Galaxy Tab hit the market with a bang! It’s the first 7-inch tablet to become available with the Android operating system (and a 10-inch version is just on the horizon), a popular open source OS that is extremely versatile, stable, and feature packed. Add in the ability for third-party software developers to create new...

Although web standards-based websites can scale effectively—and basic CSS will give you basic results—there are considerations and obstacles that high traffic websites must face to keep your development and hosting costs to a minimum. There are many tips and tricks, as well as down-to-earth best practice information, to make sure...