Learning VIM while playing a game

My name is Aurelio and I'm a Python programmer who switched to Mac OS X. Being nerd and needing to automate common tasks, the learning of the AppleScript language was unavoidable. To speed up the process I've took some notes, comparing the new commands to Python statements. The result is this document.

As the name says, it's intended for Python programmers. But if you're an applescripter interested in Python you may also benefit from it.

Annie Lowrey:

What seemed strangest about the disappearance was just how integral to the devoted community of Ruby programmers _why had been before his infosuicide. _why was not just famous within the Ruby community, but one of its creators. He had contributed thousands of lines of code to Ruby’s open-source libraries. He wrote one of the most famous guides to Ruby. Moreover, when the language was just gaining traction in the English-speaking world, _why became the equivalent of the Friday-evening bartender at the town’s only saloon, hosting a series of popular blogs and writing often on Ruby forums, evangelizing the language’s beauty and simplicity.

Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons.
Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

"I'm making some big shifts in my work in the coming months (read: focusing my energies rather than what's become the scattershot of freelance writing). I'm thrilled to say that this will mean more time for Hack Education, thanks in no small part to a research and writing project I'll be undertaking for Mozilla.

It's part of the organization's larger learning and literacy efforts, and my piece will involve researching practices and pedagogies and interviewing teachers, learners, technologists about tools for teaching programming for the Web. Specifically (or rather, conceptually), I'm asking the question: Do we need a "'Scratch' for HTML5?" All my findings and conversations will be written up here on this blog."

We are a community of motherfucking programmers who have been humiliated by software development methodologies for years.

We are tired of XP, Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, Software Craftsmanship (aka XP-Lite) and anything else getting in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

We are tired of being told we're autistic idiots who need to be manipulated to work in a Forced Pair Programming chain gang without any time to be creative because none of the 10 managers on the project can do... Programming, Motherfucker.

We must destroy these methodologies that get in the way of...Programming, Motherfucker.

A series of mixes intended for listening
while programming to aid concentration
and increase productivity (also compatible
with other activities).

Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby!
Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
Free and works on any computer.

Real Vim ninjas count every keystroke - do you?
Pick a challenge, fire up Vim, and show us what you got.

This document is a list of best practices and preferred ways of developing javascript code, based on opinions and experience from many developers in the javascript community. Since this is a list of recommendations rather than a list of absolute rules, experienced developers may have slightly differing opinions from those expressed below.

A free testing service for mobile developers, managers and testers.

NimbleKit is a fast & fun way to develop apps for iPhone and iPod touch. You don't need to know Objective-C or to be an experienced programmer. All you need is to know HTML and JavaScript. NimbleKit will integrate to Xcode and do the rest!

Welcome to Python from Scratch, where I’m going to teach you the ins and outs of Python development… from scratch. There’s no need to worry if you don’t have any ounce of Python experience. That’s what I’m here for! Let’s get started.

Project Euler, named for the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is popular (more than 150,000 users have submitted 2,630,835 solutions) precisely because Colin Hughes — and later, a team of eight or nine hand-picked helpers — crafted problems that lots of people get the itch to solve

The sum of all human knowledge about iPhoneOS Development.

As a general rule, avoid Foo in 24 hours books – they are a waste of your money and time. They are usually awfully written, and a sketchy treatment makes most of topics that you are interested in a lot MORE difficult to learn. Don't concentrate on any specific frameworks or languages – it's perfectly OK to learn these on the go (if you work as a programmer your job will simply force you to do it). Learn the science.

If you’re interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.

Unusual software bugs are a class of software bugs that are considered exceptionally difficult to understand and repair. There are several kinds, mostly named after scientists who discovered counterintuitive things.

These are instructions for compiling and installing Git, a free, fast, and efficient distributed version control system, on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

And in many important ways, C is the programmer’s punk rock: it’s fast, messy, dangerous, and perfectly willing to kick your ass, but it’s also an ideal antidote to the pretensions and vanities that plague so many new programming languages. In an era of virtual machines and managed environments, C is the original Punk Rock Language.

I do believe there are real differences among programming languages—better ones and worse ones—and I rank Lisp among the better. When you get to the bottom of it, however, I write programs in Lisp for the same reason I write prose in English—not because it’s the best language, but because it’s the language I know best.

With Ruby, and the gosu gem you can do it. It is fairly easy to get going. And if you follow our screencasts, you can have a game going in minutes!

Introducing an all new way to learn Ruby on Rails in the browser with no additional configuration needed.

Neal Wu’s last chance for international glory, and maybe America’s, too, begins with a sound like a hippo crunching through a field of dry leaves—the sound of 315 computer prodigies at 315 workstations ripping into 315 gray envelopes in unison. “You have five hours,” a voice booms across the packed gymnasium. “Good luck.”

Version control, also known as source control or revision control is an integral part of any development workflow. Why? It is essentially a communication tool, just like email or IM, but it works with code rather than human conversation.

Masters of the Void is a tutorial for Macintosh users interested in learning to program their Macintosh using Xcode and the C programming language. It assumes no prior knowledge of programming.

Potentially useful resources.

Textmate-style editor for when I have to use Windows at work.

Inconsolata is my first serious original font release. It is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print. There are a great many "programmer fonts," designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

RT @torrez: I made a todo list for anyone interested in duplicating Delicious over the weekend http://bit.ly/fvvDHe

Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. We will do our best to keep updating this list, hope you find this list useful, here we go.

Easily incorporate computational thinking into your curriculum with these classroom-ready lessons, examples, and programs. For more resources, including discussion forums and news, visit our ECT Discussion Forums.

How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for…

Aimed at teaching mathematics students how to program using their knowledge of mathematics, the entire books emphasis is on "how to think" when programming. Three methods for constructing an algorithm or a program are used: manipulation and enrichment of existing code; use of recurrent sequences; deferral of code writing, in order to deal with one difficulty at a time. Many theorems are mathematically proved and programmed, and the text concludes with an explanation of how a compiler works and how to compile "by hand" little programs. Intended for anyone who thinks mathematically and wants to program and play with mathematics.

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Ready to create your own iPhone app? This book walks you through the entire iPhone app development process, from start to finish. You'll learn how to download the tools, build the app, get it through Apple's approval process, and then market and maintain the finished product. All you need to get started is a familiarity with object-oriented programming. With "iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual", you'll get lots of illustrations, step-by-step tutorials, and real-world examples. Author and Mac guru Craig Hockenberry is your ideal guide because he's been there, having created the wildly popular Twitterific iPhone app that lets you manage your tweets and Twitter account right on your iPhone screen. Craig's goal is to make you a successful iPhone App developer, whether you're a student or an experienced programmer. He pursues this goal with clarity and a terrific sense of humor.

If you’re new to programming (or new to programming in a particular language) you might be looking for an IDE — that’s an integrated development environment, the handy, dandy piece of software that acts as text editor, debugger and compiler all in one sometimes-bloated but generally useful package.

RT @rob_schmitt: How do I learn to program? http://t.co/1rkOOce via @37signals

Rails has evolved over the years, and this book has evolved along with it. We still start with a step-by-step walkthrough of building a real application, and in-depth chapters look at the built-in Rails features. This edition now gives new Ruby and Rails users more information on the Ruby language and takes more time to explain key concepts throughout. Best practices on how to apply Rails continue to change, and this edition keeps up. Examples use cookie backed sessions, HTTP authentication, and Active Record-based forms, and the book focuses throughout on the right way to use Rails. Additionally, this edition now reflects Ruby 1.9, a new release of Ruby with substantial functional and performance improvements.

A List Apart publishes articles written for working web professionals, but we appreciate the predicament of new web designers and builders who aren't sure where to begin. As we promised in our primer for readers new to ALA, we've collected a set of starting points for the next generation of people who make websites.

Learning a new programming language always is fun and there are many great books legally available for free online. Here’s a selection of 30 of them:

text editor | file transfer | svn | css | terminal | books | more = whoah.

AppleScript is a powerful scripting language that comes built-in to OS X. The principal use for AppleScript is the automation of tasks that are normally repetitious and time consuming. For instance, as a freelancer, I hate creating invoices every week for my various clients. To solve this problem I wrote an AppleScript that reads the hours that I log into iCal, creates an invoice in Microsoft Excel based on those hours, and emails the invoices to my clients. All with the click of a button!

The less people are required to learn programming in order to be creative with computers, the more creative work you get. http://j.mp/csBNoP
– Tim Carmody (tcarmody) http://twitter.com/tcarmody/statuses/19291759796

"Say you download a document from your company’s intranet to proofread. You look up a few words as you go, and you make some edits before sending it to your boss. If you’re anything like me, the task involves Safari, Pages, Dictionary, Finder, and iChat; with every application relying on the ability to take a file or a snippet of text from your current work context and send it elsewhere. On iPhone OS, where every app lives in a sandbox and dedicates itself to a single task, this kind of work isn’t a walk in the park. Copy and paste make things possible if you take the time to switch between apps, but the experience sucks, so developers add convenience features, web service integration, and custom URL schemes. Apple provides some great APIs for integrating with the system utilities, but they’re slow moving. There’s no standard MFTweetComposeViewController, and there probably never will be."

Reference material for beginning iPhone OS development.

50 articles from Opera designed to help individuals learn web standards.

"With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts."

"Go has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language. It's a joy to use."

"You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time."

"Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science" - but relevant for many more.