Oliver Nassar

There are many browsers out there: IE6, IE7, IE8, FF, Opera, Safari, Chrome.

Then there are tons of mods for each of those. On the mac, a few lesser options (FF, Opera, Safari, soon to be Chrome). I used to scoff at Safari users when it was around the 2.0 release (even 3.0 seemed crap to me). When I adopted the Mac, however, Safari fell into a different light for me. The number one reason it did was because of it's speed.

So far, I'm done about half of Professional CodeIgniter by Thomas Myer. As you guessed, it's about the php, MVC framework CodeIgniter. While I've spent a lot of time online at the documentation, tutorials, etc., I'd preferred to grab a book on it (the only one I could find that's available) to get a more formal introduction.

Frameworks like YUI, JQuery, Mootools, Dojo, etc., are arguably the best thing to have happened to JavaScript in 10 years. I remember when I first learned about their existence. I was coding my own animation script (functional, not OO, and definitely not efficient) that didn't do anything fancy; just scrolled up and down. I remember then hearing about dojo, and thinking I'd wasted so much time.

Then what I did, was go around to all the different frameworks. I don't even think JQuery existed in it's current incarnation at that point (December of 2005), and I looked around at as many as I could (dojo, mootools, and a few others that have since become relics). This post though, isn't about the greatness of these frameworks; rather it's about the terrible abuse.

"Getting Real" by 37 Signals is a very specific read, for a very specific audience, but it does a tremendous job outlining a different approach to web development. That approach revolves around getting something 'real' out, usable, and able to gain traction. This is the strongest point that is made repeatedly, very similar to a Seth Godin read which constantly reiterates the same point, over and over again, until it's become clear.