Interesting links I found recently:

• Films considered the greatest ever – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia –
• Protovis – PolarClock – The PolarClock is an intriguing and aesthetically-pleasing visualization of the current time designed by Gabriel Bucknall. A single wedge encodes each time field (e.g., seconds, minutes) as both angle and fill color
• The Last Answer | Thrivenotes –
• Find Out If Your Computer Is Secretly Connecting to the Web –
• Multilingual list of Indian vegetables, spices and grains – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia –
• Top 10 Free Ways To Discover New Music Online –
• Invisible Web: What it is, Why it exists, How to find it, and Its inherent ambiguity –

Interesting links I found recently:

• iDump – Utility to transfer stuff from the iPod to the PC
• TumblrStats –
• 100 Must Read Books: The Man’s Essential Library –
• Ninite Blog: How Ninite was named by a computer program –
• Free PDF to Word Doc Converter – easy and powerful pdf converter software. –
• Hindi and Tamil Music Search – A music search engine for Hindi and Tamil songs which plays the songs right from the site.
• Comparing E-mail Address Validating Regular Expressions – Hug scary Regex to validate email addresses. Takes care of most known email comparisons for validity
• How to photograph a water drop –
• Firefox: 46 features you might not know about ? Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog –
• 5 Essential Steps For Hosting A Scalable Or Website –

Interesting links I found recently:

• Modernizr –
• Ajaxian » A whole lot of testing for JavaScript implementations –
• The Carnival of College Admission | InnoGage –
• Pure CSS Timeline – Notebook | MattBango.com –
• JSON: What It Is, How It Works, and How to Use It | Blog | Custom-Built Professional Web Development and Design | Ennui –
• camen design · Video for Everybody! – Embedding videos seamlessly irrespective of platform or support (almost)
  Uses native <video> tag or flash or quicktime or windows media player or finally provides a link to download the video
• Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3 | CSS | Smashing Magazine –
• A Beginners’ Guide to Big O Notation « Rob Bell –

The phrase “JavaScriptmaster” and Douglas Crockford are considered synonymous in the web development world. When I heard that Crockford was writing a book on JavaScript, especially a guide to the better features of one of the most maligned (and perhaps abused) but popular languages in the current web development industry, I was sure I wanted to read that book. I opened the book with very high expectations and unsurprisingly, I was not disappointed one bit.

With the recent explosion in the usage of JavaScript, the interest in JavaScript is at an all time high. When Netscape, which created JavaScript, released the specification of the language in the mid-nineties, it was unable to define a robust and complete specification for the language due to pressures of rushing out a production release. As a result, fair chunk of the language is not well thought out which contributes to bad programming style and promotes some bad programming practices. It is not the programmers but the language which causes this. Programming models based on Global variables, JavaScript eval, inconsistencies in variable scope, and confusion regarding how objects are created and handled in JavaScript can all be the sources of programming errors and give rise to bad programming practices.

This book, as its name suggests, focuses on the “Good Parts” of the JavaScript while cautioning the readers against the “Bad Parts” of the language. All the  above mentioned “bad parts” and many other programming constructs are cautioned against in a two-part appendix.

Two other appendices also touch  on JSLint, the powerful JavaScript syntax and program correctness verifier and JSON, the preferred and increasingly popular text data exchange format. These two chapters give a taste and a starter for two very important support tools for JavaScript.

However, the meat of the of the book focuses on the better parts of the JS language. In ten chapters, Crockford explains why features like – JS inheritance model, prototypes, objects, arrays and how the language handles regular expressions – are very useful and make JavaScript a fairly powerful language in its own right. Object Oriented programming in JS, how methods and the prototype chain is handled and can be used to write clean and powerful code are all a must read for advanced JS programmers.

The language of the book is very simple and sprinkled with illustrative source code which makes understanding the concept in discussion easy to understand. That said, this is not a beginners book. This book is aimed at those who have programmed in JS and have a working knowledge of the language. Nevertheless, it is a highly recommended book for anyone looking to get into better and more powerful JavaScript programming.

Something is wrong with the blog.. The CSS and various javascript files are not being served by the server even though they appear to be present in the themes folder. And since there is no SSH or ftp access to my server, I cannot even check until I return home..

Gaah