Learning jQuery

Many people recommend jQuery in Action as the best book for learning jQuery, but I didn't like the style that was laid down in that book. I am not saying anything about the content of the book, it's a very good reference book for jQuery and offers plenty of details for many frequently used APIs, but I feel the layout of the book certainly doesn't offer step by step introduction to somebody new to jQuery.

Folks interested in learning jQuery would benefit greatly by visiting this video tutorial by appendTo folks, it offers jQuery fundamentals in a way very easy for anyone to grasp and also the materials are laid down 4-5 mins each per topic(like khan academy tutorials).

I would also suggest using jQuery in Action book as a reference material which it fits pretty well.

Khan Academy - Awesome site that you want your kids to spend time on

I am continuously amazed by the wealth of information available in khan academy. Having started my career long back as a trainer in a software training institute, I have always loved sharing knowledge with colleagues/friends. Like any other profession you need passion to teach someone and the key is knowing how to break down complex things so people can easily understand. Sal khan has taken his part time job of teaching his cousins into this amazing wealth of information across multiple areas, I thoroughly enjoy watching his videos whenever I get time.

I want to get my kids involved with this site so they can start understanding complex topics broken down to nice smaller pieces. Kudos to sal khan for putting up a great job and doing it as a non-profit which makes it even more awesome.

Watch sal khan talk about his work in this ted video.

Nice Idea by McDonald

Pretty interesting marketing stuff from McDonald -- a new ad campaign that invites pedestrians to play a game of Pong on a giant Mickey D's billboard, using only their smartphones. Last thirty seconds, though, and you'll get a free treat of your choice.

Windows 8 is going to be cool

Came across a cool video in msnbc website in which microsoft gave first look of windows 8, I should say I was amazed of what they have done so far. I have always thought microsoft did not do anything different from the UI perspective from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 the start menu remains the same just that the size of start menu and the graphic of start menu has changed, I got tired of not seeing any drastic/cool UI improvements coming out of Microsoft. I certainly hope windows 8 doesn't become another windows incarnation with a different button for start menu and I was really amazed to see the first look of windows 8, microsoft are at last looking @ UI differently (should I say the Apple way ;) Take a look at the video

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cool tool of the day - SSMS Tools Pack

When I am troubleshooting production issues, I always have problem with having multiple SQL Server windows open trying to do update/select across different regions (I am not saying that we do updates in production on a regular ad-hoc basis but there are times we have to do that).

Fortunately, I came across a cool tool today that would reduce the confusion of which sql window I am currently in, is it development/UAT/production. SSMS tools pack is an excellent set of tools and contains the windows connection coloring feature that you can use to set which color you want to display on top of the different sql windows, probably red for your production connections and green for your development environments.

Take a look at the tool for yourself, you will sure appreciate the value of it.

Tips and Advice for Students, Teachers, and Parents

Really liked this post discussing about tips and advice for students, teachers and parents, posting it for future reference

Students

Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. Pull everything out of yourself. Work hard. Then work harder.

Success isn’t how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started.

Learn by trial and error, and don’t avoid the errors. Consider everything an experiment.

Learning doesn’t happen in class, it happens when you get home and look at the wall. Don’t forget to make time for looking at walls.

Be self-disciplined.

Be a self-advocate.

Learn from your mistakes. There is no win and no fail, there’s only honest effort.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. Worrying about work doesn’t get it done, it only makes getting started harder.

Get good at something other than school-related work (like skateboarding or cooking).

Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.Subscribe to many magazines, the more pictures the better. Don’t feel bad about not reading them cover to cover, just have them around and read what interests you, even if it’s just one article.

It’s the process, not the product that counts, because you can use it again and again and it transfers.

Don’t do school-related work under pressure. Allow lots of extra time for things that are hard, and for everything else, too.

Learning opportunities are everywhere, not just in academic settings. The more stuff you do, the more you learn. But, don’t overdo it and spread yourself too thin.

Read anything you can get your hands on. Comic books involve decoding just as great literature does.

Read billboards and road signs.

Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes.

Learn how to touch-type.

Write lots of letters.

Learn to read and use maps.

Learn to read and use indexes.

Learn to use a library.

Learn to cook and deal with food.

Watch movies, regularly.

Learn to ask questions without feeling stupid.

Travel whenever and wherever you can.

Save everything; it might come in handy later.

Give others some slack; it makes life easier.

Give yourself some slack; it makes life easier.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Teachers

Pull everything out of your students.

Extend yourself.

Be creative.

Don’t assess a student’s capabilities based on his or her I.Q. test scores. There’s more to people than test scores.

Don’t be scared to make a mess (mistakes) in front of students. If learning takes place through modeling, you must model the process of working things out, from scratch, mistakes and all. Few teachers do this, more should.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Parents

Be there, but don’t smother kids. Don’t be a “helicopter parent.” Not enough interest is neglect; too much involvement can smother and enable.

Keep the pressure low.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Learning how to read and write takes a lot of time and work. Make sure you give your kids enough time and space for them to learn.

Make sure kids practice reading and writing every day. Don’t let them miss a day for anything. Sit on them, but not too hard.

Make sure there’s a World Book Encyclopedia in the house. Any year is okay. Buy it used. Using an encyclopedia is very different from using the internet. Make sure you have both.

Learning takes place after the fact, while your kid is looking at the wall, not while he/she’s in a classroom at school. When they get home, give them the time and space to look at walls.

Don’t romanticize your past too much, kids resent it and it probably wasn’t as good as you think it was.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Attended Martin fowler's event in Chennai

Lucky to attend event organised by thoughtworks featuring Martin fowler in chennai. I never thought in my life I might get a chance to attend a event having Martin Fowler as a speaker. He gave a talk similar to suiteoftalks that he has been following of late. The areas he covered in his talks include Continuous Integration/Delivery, Strategic and Utility projects and Domain Specific languages, none of this is new if you have been following his blog closely. I was just happy to hear him talk probably this was the first time I am meeting someone in person who has made great contribution to the software community. After the talk I got a chance to have a personal chat with him and raised question about my dilema of whether to move forward to DVCS (git, mercurial) rather than the current source control (Borland StarTeam) that we have, his direct answer was "Depends on the maturity of the team, if the team is mature, DVCS is the way to go".

Hope I get a chance to meet more people like him in the future (Anders Hejlsberg ranks high on that list).

Explaining things effectively

I have always been fascinated how people come up with good visual ways of explaining complex things, this video is one such appreciative work on explanation of quicksort algorithm (link got from blog of my friend Santhosh Ahuja). Being in the software field and involved heavily in recruitment of people at various levels, what I have learnt is it's easier to find people with sound knowledge but difficult to see them possess the art of explaining things effectively (which unfortunately is a key trait needed in a personnel not only in the software field but in other fields as well).

Quicksort Explanation Video

Attended Jean Paul Boodhoo's NBDN Remote program

Couple of weeks (October 11th - October 15th) ago I had the opportunity to attend JP Boodhoo's Nothing But Dot Net remote course. I was very interested to learn more about TDD and getting myself comfortable with some of the advanced concepts in C#.

I wouldn't classify this course as advanced course in C#, rather it was advanced basics in C#. The first day JP gave us a simple task of filtering/sorting sample, JP had created test cases for each of the filtering/sorting scenario and we were writing code to make the test case pass. We went from creating a simple for loop to all the way of creating generic delegates to handle most of the collection related activities, we learnt how we could use delegates and generics effectively.

The next couple of days we created a the fictitious web application that has a shopping catalog and JP taught us about using FrontController architecture for building the application.

The final day JP discussed about the Inversion of Control Container and showed us how to create a container from scratch. I always understood the concept of dependency injection but didn't have a good idea of containers, after this session I was not only able to clearly understand the need of containers but understand the inner workings of container since we created one from scratch.

JP's style of teaching is awesome, he starts by giving us a simple code piece and takes the code of the team that completes the task first and starts refactoring the code from there. His inspirational talks all along the course was an added bonus.

A cool added knowledge I got from the course was the knowledge of DVCS (usage of git and github) for coding purpose, I understand how effective DVCS is over the traditional source control repository and how to use it effectively in the current projects where we do quite a lot of branching.

I would seriously recommend this course to anybody who has been doing OOPS development (not necessarily c#) for atleast 5-6 years to take this course and understand what the real OOPS development is all about. I don't think anybody would walk out of the course and say that they are an TDD expert or anything of that sort (and JP doesn't expect you to say that as well), the course makes you understand where you stand and gives pointers on where to go from here and how to achieve your goals. I certainly think the course would have profound impact in my professional as well as personnel life. Since I was from India and JP has never been to India for taking NBDN courses, I had no choice but to take NBDN remote course, given a choice I would advice people to take NBDN direct course rather than remote course since you would be interacting with JP and your fellow developers directly which would be even more awesome. JP has promised to come down to India some time soon and I am looking forward to attending the NBDN direct course once again.

The only difficult part for me was I was attending the course from Chennai, India the course timing for my time zone was from 9 PM to 9 AM India time. I tried to get as much sleep possible during my day time, but it was not possible to get good amount of sleep and I was mentally exhausted by the end of the week.

Even though I paid for the course myself, it was money well spent. Now I am off to read through the books suggested by JP. I have successfully completed my first objective of reading through "Refactor with Wetware" by Andy Hunt. Now comes the difficult part, applying it in real life :)

Cool SQL tool - SQL Heartbeat

I have lived many a days watching performance of SQL queries using SQL Profiler (Claims Inquiry??? - for people who knew about it) . Finding ways to improve the time taken and optimizing the same was a fun exercise; I always hate the idea of using SQL profiler, I always thought it was probably one of the worse Microsoft tools without good user interaction, I agreee that it was one of the powerful tools available to monitor SQL Server but not the best tool in terms of user interaction.

Anybody who feels the same way should try (free) tool SQL Heartbeat, it gives the information of your database in a visual way so it makes it easy to grasp the data.
Processes grow larger as they use more resources. Red balloons appear when locking occurs. Download it from: sqlsolutions