haml, sass, North Carolina and Book Reports

Hey remember how I was going to do some new code related thing every day in February, and blog about it every day? And then I didn't update this blog for three weeks? WHOOPS! CODETOBER is dead in the water, but I'm still coding. I promise!

So here's what's been going on. My new schedule has proven to be too busy to blog or work on other things as much.

Last week most of Expected Behavior (minus Michael) headed to North Carolina on a business trip. My buddy Joel (what's up Joel) loaned me several design related books:

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Don't Make Me Think was probably the most useful of the books I read last week. Tons of great advice about UI design, and common mistakes to avoid. It's a few years old (and the age definitely shows in a few places) but it's still a great resource.

Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cedarholm

Handcrafted CSS is definitely my favorite book I read. I've always loved web design, and I've always wished I knew more about it. Last week was a great chance to work on my design chops, and this book explored graceful degradation, css frameworks and other easily applicable ideas.

Fluid Web Typography by Jason Cranford Teague

Fluid Web Typography is mostly about typography (WEIRD) and while I still haven't finished this book, I've been interested in fonts and typography for a few years now. I'm sorry I can't provide a more in-depth book report on this one.

I read through Don't Make Me Think on the way to North Carolina, and Handcrafted CSS on the way home. I also started Fluid Web Typography, but that was enough reading for one car trip.

I spent a lot of time working with haml and sass last week, so I don't want to give the impression that I'm not coding these days. I don't typically enjoy reading through less practical books, but I picked up a lot of great ideas from reading through these books. And I've always loved web design, and getting to work on redesigning our product StatRaptor was pretty awesome. I'm not as far along as I'd like to be with the redesign, but I've made a lot of progress.

And I'm still using Emacs, since it's not as intimidating now that I know how to do some basic things like open and save files, switch buffers, kill buffers, and so on. I still feel I'd be a bit more productive using TextMate or Sublime Text, but I don't think Emacs is tripping me up as much as I thought it would a few weeks ago.

So that's where I am with coding now. It's awesome to work on interesting problems. But that's what coding SHOULD be about, right?

Lastly, I am absolutely STARVED for more book recommendations. I'm planning to finish up Fluid Web Typography, then dive back into the Pragmatic Programmer. What other books should I be reading? I'm especially interested in web and user interface design books, but anything, anything, ANYTHING you've found valuable is highly appreciated.

Still working on taming Emacs

I find that I often get tripped up by little things when it comes to programming. For example, I was going through that haml tutorial I posted about a couple of days ago, and I wondered exactly how Rails would know to use the haml file instead of the old erb file. After all, I'd already installed the gem and listed it in the Gemfile.

It turns out I didn't have to do anything else. I could have just renamed the .erb file to use a .haml extension. Luckily this didn't take long to figure out, but I've got a history of overlooking things like this that should be fairly obvious.

haml itself is easy enough to understand. Take those dirty div tags for example!

<div class="content">AWESOME CONTENT</div>

Is magically transformed into

.content AWESOME CONTENT

EDIT: Corrected this information, thanks to Joel. In haml, a . signifies a class, whereas a # signifies an id.

There's more to haml than this, but it's an abstraction of XHTML which makes writing code easier and less tedious. I was thinking of taking the time to do a more in-depth tutorial for haml, but instead I'm going to incorporate it into this Twitter Bootstrap for Rails 3.1 tutorial series my buddy Joel sent my way.

I hope you guys like reading about Twitter Bootstrap, because that's absolutely what I'll be blogging about this week.

I've also made some progress with Emacs, and no longer feel lost when trying to do basic things like open recent files. I've definitely got some work to do before I feel really comfortable coding with Emacs, but I don't think it'll take long to get the basics down. I went through the notes I made at Fort Behavior last week and threw them into a .txt file, so I'll just have that open when using Emacs until I don't need it.

How do I Buffer? Also doing a haml tutorial

So tonight I've been working through this tutorial on haml, working on converting Chorenivore from .erb to .haml view files. Everything's going pretty well so far, but I'm having more trouble than I thought since I'm still learning Emacs.

I've been pretty sorely tempted to just install Textmate or Sublime Text, in order to reduce the number of things that are giving me difficulty, but I did promise Gordon and the other Expected Behavior guys that I'd give Emacs a shot. Four days does not qualify as giving Emacs a shot, you lazy programmer!

I'm going to do some more work with haml tomorrow (kind of funny to think that learning how to use it won't be nearly as difficult as learning how to effectively use the buffer in Emacs is proving to be) and I'd like to take a look at the new version of Twitter Bootstrap that came out this week.

So far I'm enjoying CODETOBER. If nothing else, the guilt of not coding and blogging is prompting me to code and blog more. It's also not as structured as I'd imagined it at first. It hasn't been DAY 1: HAML, DAY 2: CUCUMBER by any means, but as long as I'm doing new things, learning how things work and blogging about it, I think I'm on the right track. And it's definitely a good idea to work on things I use for Expected Behavior work, such as Emacs, haml, sass and Twitter Bootstrap.