2011-01

Bookmarklets: quickly link to a website

[2011-01-07] browser, bookmarklet, hack, blogging, computers
Copying links to web pages is tedious, because you have to go to them twice in order to copy both URL and title. The following three bookmarklets help speed up that process by letting you copy everything in one go. Click on a link to try it out or move it to the bookmarks bar to use it later, on any page.

Bookmarklets: simple plugins for your browser

[2011-01-07] browser, bookmarklet, hack, computers
A bookmarklet is a bookmark whose URL (web address) contains a small program that does something useful with the currently displayed web page. To execute the program, you click on the bookmark.

Browser keywords: using the address bar as a command line

[2011-01-07] browser, firefox, hack, computers, chrome
Keywords are commands you can enter in the browser address bar to quickly go to a website and perform, say, a search.

Going completely prototypal in JavaScript

[2011-01-07] pl fundamentals, dev, javascript, jslang
Update 2011-06-25:Prototypes as classes” is an improved version of this blog post.

In this post we present the Proto API which implements inheritance in JavaScript in a purely prototypal fashion. This contrasts it with all other JavaScript inheritance APIs that the author is aware of.

Reflection and meta-programming in JavaScript

[2011-01-05] pl fundamentals, dev, javascript, jslang
JavaScript is relatively weak when it comes to reflection and metaprogramming. Let us see what you can and cannot do. This post uses some of the standard methods of ECMAScript 5 (ES5).

Three JavaScript shells

[2011-01-04] dev, javascript, jslang
A JavaScript shell (interactive command line) is great for trying out stuff. This post shows three ways of getting such a shell.

Tip: get all Unix console programs to support arrow keys

[2011-01-04] emacs, dev, hack, unix, shell

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

[2011-01-01] dev, textbook, software engineering

2010-12

An easy way to understand JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance

[2010-12-28] programming languages, pl fundamentals, dev, javascript, jslang
Update 2011-06-25:Prototypes as classes” is an improved version of this blog post.

This blog post explains JavaScript’s prototypal inheritance in a simple way. As it turns out, if we initially leave out constructors, then it is easy to understand. Thus, we first look at the fictional programming language ProtoScript which is JavaScript minus constructors, explain it, and then move on to constructors. As a result, you should have a solid understanding of prototypal inheritance and won’t be confused, any more, by all the JavaScript tricks out there.

Eight important books for software developers

[2010-12-27] dev, book, software engineering
Each of the following eight books has greatly influenced how I think about software development. Note that this list is not exhaustive, there are obviously other important books out there, many of whom I have not read (yet).