NAMIN-XO

I am reading the book Visualizing Data by the creator of the Processing. So far, so good.

In addition to my research assistanship (with Prof. Saman Amarasinghe and Bill Thies on computer-assisted design for programmable microfluidics), I’ll be taking two of the following classes this coming spring:

• 6.833 The Human Intelligence Enterprise
• 6.945 Large-scale Symbolic Systems
• 21M.284 Film Music

I hesitate between 6.833 and 6.945: do I want to become a better writer (6.833) or programmer (6.945)? In the short term, I might benefit more from 6.945, as it would perhaps apply to the work on JavaScript analysis I’ll likely be doing in the summer at Google Zürich. I’ll start by attending both and see which one I am more compelled towards: I guess it will depend on which class I feel would be more effective in its teaching.

Since I am shifting my interests away from Squeak, I removed these permanent links:

• Squeak by Example
• Squeak
• Scratch
• Squeaky Tales
• Etoys @ OLPC

I’ve been learning JavaScript with JavaScript: The Definite Guide, 5th Edition by David Flanagan, whom I remember from Java in a Nutshell as an author who explains concepts clearly without dumbing them down. Eventually, I’ll look at the actual language specs: EMCAScript 3 Language Spec, ES4 Language Overview.

I’ve also barely started looking at frameworks, such as dojo, Prototype and jQuery. I am most impressed by jQuery as introduced in jQuery for JavaScript programmers. Eventually, I’d like to use a popular framework with at least OOP support and with source code I can understand. So despite my interest for using jQuery, I am getting started by looking into Prototype because the source code, which I got straight from the repository, is rather small, plain and searchable.

Recommended resources:

• Douglas Crockford gives bits of passionate insights about JavaScript.
• A re-introduction to JavaScript is a nice review of the core essentials.

I played a little with the Smalltalk web framework Seaside. It was a piece of cake to create this little application. Now, I am taking a look at DabbleDB.