I’ve been a huge fan of Douglas Crockford and his articles about JavaScript for a long time. I often point people to his The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language article when I hear them complaining about the language. It’s taken me a couple of years to get around to reading his book, JavaScript: The Good Parts, but it exceeded all of my expectations.

Being an avid reader of his online stuff, and having watched various talks of his I knew the book would be well written and informative, but I thought it’d probably just repeat much of what I’d already read, without providing much new information or insights. To a certain extent this was true, the book does reiterate what’s said in many of his online articles and talks, but the book is absolutely amazing for a different reason: The code examples.

The book is extremely succinct. There’s no padding, and very little dialog to join one section to the next. There is a common thread thoughout the book though, and that’s the code. Examples of good coding practices are repeated, and functions written in earlier chapters are often reused in later ones. So although the book appears to be presenting one feature at a time with a small code example you’re actually building up more and more complex javascript applications, and the book ends with a full JSON parser!

Crockford’s coding style seems to match his writing style: succinct and to the point. There’s some really great code in the book, that I think even non-JavaScript developers could appreciate. Here’s my favourite, from the chapter on regular expressions:

var parse_url = /^(?:([A-Za-z]+):)?(\/{0,3})([0-9.\-A-Za-z]+)(?::(\d+))?(?:\/([^?#]*))?(?:\?([^#]*))?(?:#(.*))?$/;
var url = 'http://www.ora.com:80/goodparts?q#fragment';
 
var result = parse_url.exec(url);
var names = ['url', 'scheme', 'slash', 'host', 'port', 'path', 'query', 'hash'];
var blanks = '       ';
var i;
for (i = 0; i < names.length; i += 1) {
    document.writeln(names[i] + ':' + blanks.substring(names[i].length), result[i]);
}

Which outputs:

url:    http://www.ora.com:80/goodparts?q#fragment
scheme: http
slash:  //
host:   www.ora.com
port:   80
path:   goodparts
query:  q
hash:   fragment

I also love the explanations Crockford gives as to why he avoids using certain parts of JavaScript, and limits himself to a “good” subset of the language. He doesn’t simply say “This is bad and you shouldn’t use it”, it’s usually accompanied by a story about a time when Crockford had used that feature and got caught out, which is much more compelling.

I think it’s fair to say that JavaScript: The Good Parts is one of my favourite programming books: It’s succinct, packed full of great code examples and best practices for writing maintainable and bug free code. It’s a fantastic JavaScript reference, but much of what the book talks about is relevant to programming in general. Highly recommended!

I have been using Python for quite a few years, but mostly for writing one off sysadmin scripts, command line utilities, and of course PyRadio. Most of my web development work has been done with PHP. The language gets a lot of bad press, some deserved and some not so much. I’ve had my own gripes, but all-in-all I’ve been fairly happy with PHP.

Several months ago, though, I thought I’d give Django a try, a python based web framework. I was completely blown away!  Compared to the PHP frameworks I’d worked with, such as Cake, it was just so much more of a pleasure to work with. So here are 8 reasons why you should give Django a try yourself if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed!

1. Great Documentation

The Django documentation is well written, extremely comprehensive, and up to date. The official documentation contains details API references, loads of relevant examples, and tutorials for those getting started. If that isn’t enough there’s also a whole book that’s available for free online.

2. It’s Python

The fact that it’s Python is a huge plus point for me. It’s a great language that doesn’t suffer from many of the well documented inconsistencies that PHP does, and includes some nice features such as decorators and first-class functions. Going back to PHP you soon start to miss the little things, such as the ability to assign multiple values at once, and the simplicity of slicing lists.

3. The ORM

Django’s object relational mapper completely abstracts away the database, meaning you don’t need to worry about your database schema or constructing SQL queries. If you’re using to writing SQL queries then the QuerySet API takes a little getting used to, but it’s really worth the effort. Projects like South make the ORM even more powerful, allowing you to make schema changes and data migrations automatically.

4. Built in Development Server

Where PHP really shines is on its ease of deployment. Setting up a local development server can be a bit of a pain though, especially if you’re working on several different sites. Django comes with a built in development server though, so you can be up and running within minutes! From your project’s root directory you just do

./manage.py runserver

and access your django website from http://localhost:8000 – awesome!

5. The Admin Interface

Django’s built-in admin interface is practically a full blown CMS, allowing you to add, delete or update your data. It’s pretty much all automatic, but it’s also fairly configuration. See the documentation to see what it can do!

6. Reusable Applications

Django projects are broken up into “applications”, and there are lots of existing reusable applications that you can use for your own projects, such as those for user registration, facebook integration, blogging, and many many more.

Existing applications are great, but the whole project/application distinction also forces you to think about your own project structure and therefore more likely to make reusable components that you can use in more of your own projects, or even share for others to use.

7. Templates

I’ve always been a bit dubious about the merits of PHP template engines such as Smarty. The Django template layer is great though. The inheritance model works well, and the restrictive language really forces you to have a very clean separation of presentation and logic.

8. Forms

I usually find dealing with user input one of the most boring parts of web development. It takes time to get it right, and its repetitive. The Django Form API really simplifies things. You can define your form class, include and validation rules, and simply add a few lines to your template and few lines to your view and you’re done!

So those are my 8 reasons why you should give django a go. If you’re already a django user let me know if you have any points to add!

If you’ve ever got to work with javascript and IE6 then you might want to read the guest post I wrote for Six Revisions: Debugging Javascript in Internet Explorer 6.

The post describes how to configure IE6 so that instead of displaying subtle and cryptic error messages when you run into a Javascript issue it will instead allow you to debug the problem with the help of Visual Studio’s powerful debugger. I’ve put together a small slideshow that includes a summary of the content:

At work we’re experiencing some fairly rapid growth, and our single production server is starting the feel the strain. I’ve been doing a lot of investigation into how we can scale the site, and thankfully there is lots of information out there.

The “Do you Scale” presentation I saw at PHP London a couple of months ago gave a good high level overview of scalability issues, and included some useful techniques to help you scale.

I think I’ve found the ultimate scalability presentation though: “Real World Web: Performance & Scalability”. The 189 slides contained within this presentation cover almost everything I’ve read elsewhere, and it’s packed full of practice advice!

Whether your a full time freelancer or someone who does projects on the side for a bit of extra cash the web is a great place to find new clients and exciting projects. Below is a list of ten of the best freelance development job sites on the Internet:

1. All Dev Jobs
Mainly web development projects.

2. Authentic Jobs
A fairly active job board that attracts some great project postings.

3. Freelance Switch
The freelance switch job board is very active, and contains a wide range of development jobs. There is a catch though: It costs $7 a month to reply to any of the postings.

4. Javascript Ninja Jobs
This is a job board for freelance javascript jobs from John Resig, the author of the jQuery library.

5. MetaFilter Jobs
Freelance development projects, mostly consisting of web and mobile application development.

6. No Agencies Please
Primarily a site for UK based work, but there are lots of remote projects. Includes a whole range of different development projects, and isn’t just limited to web development.

7. Programmer Meet Designer
A site that aims to introduce programmers to designers. Many of the projects that get listed are for skills exchanges (eg. you code my site I’ll design yours. There are occasionally paid jobs though, so it’s worth checking the site every so often.

8. Search Web Jobs
Lots of web development jobs, primarily involving CSS, HTML, PHP and MySQL.

9. Smashing Jobs
The job board of the online web development magazine.

10. Web Directions Jobs
Web development jobs. Mostly PHP and Javascript.

So that’s 10 of the best places to find freelance development work online. Checking those 10 sites every for new projects isn’t easy though! That’s why I developed the next site.

Bonus!

11. Plasis Jobs
Plasis Jobs aggregates freelance development jobs from 8 of the above 10 sites, so instead of having to check lots of different sites everyday to make sure you don’t miss out on a great new project you only need to check one! It also filters the jobs so that only freelance development jobs are shown, rather than full time jobs, or jobs for designers.

Suggestions?

Are there any freelance development sites you use that aren’t listed here? Please leave a comment!