{"id":98,"date":"2006-01-23T01:51:16","date_gmt":"2006-01-23T09:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/98"},"modified":"2006-01-23T01:51:16","modified_gmt":"2006-01-23T09:51:16","slug":"library-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/98","title":{"rendered":"Library Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Coming off of a nice family dinner very satiated, so I&#8217;m in a good position to do an update.  I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a while ago, but this is my first post since.  Quite nice, from the admin side of things.  \ud83d\ude42  It&#8217;s even got a WYSIWYG editor, and a nice dialogue for inserting images.  The file upload has been merged into the write post section, which makes good sense, but it&#8217;s still pretty limiting.  As far as I&#8217;m concerned, good image handling is WordPress&#8217; greatest weakness.  I&#8217;d like to upload my image and not care about resizing it before I upload it, or link to it with a certain style, etc.  I just want to do it and have it work.  Maybe, I&#8217;ll look into some PHP sometime soon&#8230;.  (probably not).  Oh, almost forgot to mention, they finally got a <em>real<\/em> preview!  Wow.  Bout time.  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>So, I&#8217;ve been taking advantage of the lovely public library, recently.  A while back, I wrote a <em>&#8220;purchase recommendation&#8221;<\/em> to the Vancouver Public Library, for <a title=\"The Official Gnome 2 Developer's Guide\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nostarch.com\/frameset.php?startat=gnome_foundation\">The Official Gnome 2 Developer&#8217;s Guide<\/a>.  My argument must have been compelling, because they emailed a while later me saying they had the book on hold for me.  Sweet!  Unfortunately, this was over the holidays, and I was kind of occupied with other things, so I didn&#8217;t get much chance to read the book.  It seemed quite good, though &#8211; definitely another C workout.  (I&#8217;m not so sure about GObjects, tho.  I&#8217;ll likely be using the C++ wrapper for most stuff.)  Normally, I would have just extended my borrow-time, but someone else <em>also<\/em> had the book on request!  I now await my time til the book is returned.  They also have an ebook resource, so if you have a VPL card, you can read the book online.  But if you go to check it out, be sure to click on <em>&#8220;Electronic Resources&#8221;<\/em> from the main page &#8211; the link from the book&#8217;s catalogue page doesn&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<p>When I returned my book, I picked up an XML book, but I haven&#8217;t read much of that to comment on, yet.<\/p>\n<p>Holding true to my recent declaration of doing something new with my blog, I recently got a CSS book from the local library.  Now, a good CSS book is really hard to come by, at the library, because CSS is a relatively new thing.  The big library, downtown, has some decent looking CSS books, but they&#8217;re deemed <em>&#8220;popular,&#8221;<\/em> so you can only take them out for 1 week at a time.  And each day late is a buck!  Ouch&#8230;  Anyways, I don&#8217;t have enough spare time in a typical week to burrow through one of those, so I haven&#8217;t picked one up, yet.  But I noticed <a title=\"CSS Web Design For Dummies\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dummies.com\/WileyCDA\/DummiesTitle\/productCd-0764584251.html\">CSS Web Design For Dummies<\/a> at my local library, and I&#8217;ve been reading that for the last couple of weeks.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never read a more Microsoft centric reference.  The author even recommends Visual Studio for websites!  What the&#8230;!  At the beginning of the book, it&#8217;s made very clear that it will mostly consider IE.  It&#8217;s stated that the <span style=\"font-style: italic\">&#8220;Browser wars are over&#8221;<\/span> and <span style=\"font-style: italic\">&#8220;IE won<\/span>.&#8221;  It also has a useless chapter (which I skipped) on <em>IE transitions<\/em>!  <span style=\"font-style: italic\">Ew&#8230;.<\/span>  Almost all of the script was done in VBScript&#8230;  Hey, if you&#8217;re already using VisualStudio, I guess you might as well&#8230;.  So it wasn&#8217;t doing a good job of impressing me, but I kept in mind that it was a <span style=\"font-style: italic\">For Dummies<\/span> book, and most people reading it would probably be quite happy with the conclusions drawn.  And perhaps, some of them, would even <span style=\"font-style: italic\">like<\/span> the IE transitions.  My expectations were extremely low, but I figured I&#8217;d be able to glean <span style=\"font-style: italic\">something<\/span>. In truth, I&#8217;ve never formally learned CSS or read any book on CSS, so there were lots of holes to fill in my knowledge. But I&#8217;m almost done reading the book, and foresee many holes remaining.  That&#8217;s not to say I haven&#8217;t learned anything.  I have.  And I&#8217;m glad I read it.  But I would not recommend buying it.  Borrowing it from the library is fine, though!  \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Coming off of a nice family dinner very satiated, so I&#8217;m in a good position to do an update. I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 a while ago, but this is my first post since. Quite nice, from the admin side of things. \ud83d\ude42 It&#8217;s even got a WYSIWYG editor, and a nice dialogue for inserting&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/archives\/98\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Library Books<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,1,7],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-98","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-general","category-website","tag-linux","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4jEMb-1A","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stevenbrown.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}