Aeonite writes "Quests have always been a part of fantasy gaming; from the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons to World of Warcraft's myriad quest lines, quests have given players purpose beyond button-pressing and mindless grinding. Jeff Howard's Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narrative is an exploration of such quests in both literary and gaming contexts, comparing and contrasting their appearances in each medium and striving to bring the two worlds closer together by imbuing game quests with more meaning." Read below for the rest of Michael's review

jgomo3 writes "Finally, the stable version 1.0 of Django (one of the most popular free Python based frameworks) has been released. Explained in the project blog, this achievement was in part due to the great users and developers community of the Django project, and recall the big effort with numbers like 4000 commits and 2000 bugs fixed since last stable version. Django is 'The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.' You can dive in by reading the overview."

I'm a web developer who has design and programming experience. So, VB, ASP, PHP, Coldfusion, Perl, even C and C++ I have in my belt. I also use Dreamweaver and/or do a lot of my HTML/XHTML/JavaScript coding by hand. So, the DOM, DHTML, etc, all good to me and even OOP thinking and design I have when I code. And I even have MySQL and other databases, again, not an issue here. So, my weak point is — Java — I see so many jobs out there with J2EE, Hibernate, Eclipse, Netbeans. Beside the obvious, which is to learn Java the core language, I don't know where else to go from there. There is so much! What should I read? in what order? What software do I require? UML? Swing? I mean, what is the curriculum required for someone to say they are a solid Java developer? Even assuming I have to go through Java itself, what are the good books out there?

Esther Schindler writes to tell us that Lynn Greiner has another look at the state of the scripting universe as a follow on to the same topic three years ago. Greiner talks to major players from each of the main scripting languages (PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby, and Javascript) to find out the current status and where they are headed in the future. "The biggest change since 2005 has been the growth of richer Web applications that perform more of their computations in the browser using JavaScript. The demand for these applications has forced developers to learn and use JavaScript much more than before. There's also been a lot of interest in Ruby, another dynamic language, spurred by the release and growth of Ruby on Rails. As a result of these changes, many developers are becoming more comfortable with dynamic languages."

Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

Don't feel sorry for him, his dad used to wash every python in the village with a toothbrush when he was his age.

rsk writes "Keyczar is an encryption toolkit born out of the Google Security Team and released under the Apache 2 license. Keyczar's purpose is to make managing encryption of secured data much easier than it has been, with the following features: a simple API; key rotation and versioning; safe default algorithms, modes, and key lengths; automated generation of initialization vectors and ciphertext signatures; Java and Python implementations (C++ coming soon); and international support in Java (Python coming soon). The example on the website is only 2 lines long, and a more fully worked out example is also provided for folks wanting to get started 'for reals.'"

alxtoth writes "Snowflake is a new BSD-licensed tool that parses SQL Select statements and generates a diagram. It shows parts of the underlying SQL directly in the diagram. For example: x=30, GROUP BY (year), SUM (sales), HAVING MIN (age) > 18. The primary reason for the tool was to avoid Cartesian joins and loops in SQL written by hand, with many joined tables. The database will execute such a statement, if syntactically correct, resulting in runaway queries that can bring the database down. If you sit close to the DBAs, you can hear them screaming... "

Chromodromic writes "Apress's newest Django offering, Practical Django Projects by James Bennett, weighs in lightly at 224 pages of actual tutorial content, but trust me, they're dense pages. Filled with pragmatic examples which directly address the kinds of development issues you will encounter when first starting out with Django, this book makes an important addition to the aspiring Django developer's reference shelf. In particular, the book's emphasis on demonstrating best practices while building complete projects does an excellent job of accelerating an understanding of Django's most powerful features — in a realistic, pragmatic setting — and which a developer will be able to leverage in very short order." Read below for the rest of Greg's review.

Anonymous Hacker writes "I'm in a bit of a bind. My young teenage son is starting to get curious about computers, and in particular, programming. Now, I'm a long time kernel hacker (Linux, BSD and UNIX). I have no trouble handling some of the more obscure things in the kernel. But teaching is not something that I'm good at, by any means. Heck, I can't even write useful documentation for non-techies. So my question is: what's the best way to encourage his curiosity and enable him to learn? Now, I know there are folks out there with far better experience in this area than myself. I'd really appreciate any wisdom you can offer. I'd also be especially interested in what younger people think, in particular those who are currently in college or high school. I've shown my son some of the basics of the shell, the filesystem, and even how to do a 'Hello World' program in C. Yet, I have to wonder if this is the really the right approach. This was great when I was first learning things. And it still is for kernel hacking, and other things. But I'm concerned whether this will bore him, now that there's so much more available and much of this world is oriented towards point-n-click. What's the best way to for a young teen to get started in exploring this wonderful world of computers and learning how to program? In a *NIX environment, preferably." Whether or not you have suggestions for generating interest or teaching methods, there was probably something that first piqued your curiosity. It seems like a lot of people get into programming by just wondering how something works or what they can make it do. So, what caught your eye?

stoolpigeon writes "It seems that it wasn't long ago that Google was just a search company. The number of on-line products that fly under the Google moniker, today, is impressive. Google has moved well beyond its office-suite-like applications and excelled with everything from mapping to blogging to 3-D drawing. Google Apps Hacks is a new book from O'Reilly, published in conjunction with their Make magazine. This volume presents the reader with 141 hacks in an attempt to get the most out of a wide array of Google's on-line applications. The result is a quick ride that is rather fun — and while a bit shallow at times, it provides a great overview of just how much is available out there." Read below for the rest of JR's review.

An anonymous reader writes "A student at UC Davis has created some stunning visualizations of open source software contributions, including Eclipse, Python, Apache httpd and Postgres. From the website: 'This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.'"

danielstoner writes "The article '13 reasons why Ruby, Python and the gang will push Java to die... of old age' makes an interesting analysis of the programming languages battling for a place in programmers' minds. What really makes a language popular? What really makes a language 'good'? What is success for a programming language? Can we say COBOL is a successful language? What about Ruby, Python, etc?"

Joe Kauzlarich writes "Finally, someone has done us all the great service of publishing a book about the second most well-known compiler compiler, Terence Parr's Antlr, and it was written, moreover, by Parr himself and published as part of the somewhat-usually-reliable Pragmatic Bookshelf series. Take note, while it requires a JVM to run, Antlr is not just for Java developers; it generates compilers in Python, Ruby, C, C++, C# and Objective-C. Also note that this book is more than just an elaborated man-page; it is also an excellent introduction to the concepts of compiler and parser design." Keep reading for the rest of Joe's review.

Pickens writes "Dr. Dobbs has an interesting interview with Paul Jansen, the managing director of TIOBE Software, about the Programming Community Index, which measures the popularity of programming languages by monitoring their web presence. Since the TIOBE index has been published now for more than 6 years, it gives an interesting picture about trends in the usage of programming languages. Jansen says not much has affected the top ten programming languages in the last five years, with only Python entering the top 10 (replacing COBOL), but C and C++ are definitely losing ground. 'Languages without automated garbage collection are getting out of fashion,' says Jansen. 'The chance of running into all kinds of memory problems is gradually outweighing the performance penalty you have to pay for garbage collection.'"

Joe Kauzlarich writes "In 2006, the on-line movie rental store Netflix proposed a $1 million prize to whomever could write a movie recommendation algorithm that offered a ten percent improvement over their own. As of this writing, the intriguingly-named Gravity and Dinosaurs team holds first place by a slim margin of .07 percent over BellKor, their algorithm an 8.82 percent improvement on the Netflix benchmark. So, the question remains, how do they write these so-called recommendation algorithms? A new O'Reilly book gives us a thorough introduction to the basics of this and similar lucrative sciences." Keep reading for the rest of Joe's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Google is giving a handful of web programmers the opportunity to create and run their own Web applications on their servers. Today's launch of a preview release of Google App Engine signals a new era of collaboration with third-party software developers. 'The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new Web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users," said Google product manager, Paul McDonald in a blog post."

Michael J. Ross writes "When software developers need to manipulate text programmatically — such as finding all substrings within some text that match a particular pattern — the most concise and flexible solution is to use "regular expressions," which are strings of characters and symbols that can look anything but regular. Nonetheless, they can be invaluable for locating text that matches a pattern (the "expression"), and optionally replacing the matched text with new text. Regular expressions have proven so popular that they have been incorporated into most if not all major programming languages and editors, and even at least one Web server. But each one implements regular expressions in its own way — which is reason enough for programmers to appreciate the latest edition of Regular Expression Pocket Reference, by Tony Stubblebine." Read below for the rest of Michael's review.

Rockhopper writes "Ars Technica has a combo review/hack guide for the Tux Droid, a programmable penguin. 'Tux is completely programmable at practically every level, and all of the source code of the firmware and software used by the droid is available from Kysoh's version control repository. There are several ways to program the droid's behavior, ranging from modifying the firmware to coding a gadget in Python.' There's a sample Python script that will cause Tux to speak IRC messages out loud when the user's name is mentioned."