By : saikiran - Designholik

This is a good book for anyone who's just starting out in web design, especially those with a creative slant than a technical one. It is all about principles of design, layout ideas, color theory, textures, typography.

Information Architecture

Importance of information architecture (IA) is explained, like how to take the requirements before starting the design process and how to start the design process. Unfortunately most of the clients do not provide enough information for design process.

Grid system

Very well explained about the importance of grid system. I found some interesting things like “The Rule of Thirds”, “960 ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• Django Dose community catchup episode #32 is out. Listen to it here.
• Luke Plant has released a django app called django-anonymizer. It anonymizes sensitive data like customer information while maintaining the database structure intact.
• Armin Ronacher who contends that web development is dangerous (and rightly so!) blogs about the common mistakes made by a web developer.
• John Anderson has a very interesting post on "Tips and Tricks for the Python Interpreter". Must read!
• Charles Leifer has written a generic app to provide for auto-completion of django models. Currently, it supports the solr, redis and sql database backends.
• Kyle Neath has ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

My colleague Javed had written a fantastic article a short while back on "Seven reasons why you should switch to Vim" and as an emacs user I thought I should share my setup too. One of the coolest things at Agiliq is that we are free to use the development tools of our choice. As a case to explain the point, everyone at agiliq uses a different editor and if someday a flame war would escalate to the third world war, I assure you it would start from Agiliq ;-)

Though I have been using emacs for more than two years ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Pragmatic Guide to JavaScript is the Pragprog's book by Christophe Porteneuve which I have wanted to read for a while.

I went into this book expecting to read actionable and task focussed book on modern JavaScript, and this book does not disappoint on that count. Using 35 tasks which you are going to need in your browser based JS development, this books teaches required JS techniques.

However I went into the book expecting a framework agnostic approach. This book however is very heavily focussed on Pototype. Initial chapters start as framework agnostic, but they soon turn into Prototype based ...

By : Shabda Raaj

The Principles of Successful Freelancing is book I read after The Principles of Project Management.

My motivation from this book was to use freelancing advice and use that for our (larger) business. This book is razor focussed on Freelancing and even more on people who are starting with or considering starting freelancing. If you are in this group I consider this book very well written, and a must read, but if you are part of a larger group, the razor sharp focus makes this not worthwhile.

Chapter wise it is:

1. Chapter 1: Considering Freelancing?
2. Chapter 2: Prepare for the Transition ...

By : Shabda Raaj

The Principles of Project Management is the book I am reading after Outsourcing Web Projects.

I went into this book expecting lot of actionable steps I can use for our projects right away, however this book is heavier on theory. Guess I can not complain with the name being The Principles of Project Management.

In their own words the book has,

So What Is Project Management Anyway?

This chapter forms an introduction to the art and science of project management. Here, we talk about the key phases every project goes through and why project management skills are increasingly important today ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Sitepoint had a book sales running recently where they made all their books available for sale at 7$. Being a sucker for good books and deals, I bought more than I should have. Here is the review of the first I read, "Outsourcing web projects."

This books is written from the viewpoint of buyers, but as a vendor, I have some insights (IMO) from the other side.

It starts with these chapters.

• How to Have Vendors Competing for your Job.
• How to Find the Perfect Outsourcing Partner.
• How to Get the Best Price for your Project.
• How to Get it ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

It's been a while since we posted a link roundup. With holidays starting soon, we thought of advancing the post.

• In the second part of the series the Open Source team at The Washington Times writes about "App-centric django development". Here they discuss the files required for a complete app.
• Are you a full-stack programmer? Interesting article by Carlos Bueno of Facebook on the various interconnections in computing.
• Daniel Greenfeld wrote a post on why he prefers stupid template languages. His post received reactions from Armin Ronacher, author of Jinja2, Mike Bayer of Mako and Steve Holden, chairman of ...

By : Javed Khan

The protocol enables XMPP entities to create nodes (topics) at a
pubsub service and publish information at those nodes; an event
notification (with or without payload) is then broadcasted to all ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Unfuddle is the tool we use for our non open source development. I have found it to be the best tool for Software Project management, in particular I think it is superior to Basecamp and Assembla.

When you start using Unfuddle, the number of things can seem overwhelming. This tutorial should help you Unfuddle the Unfuddle.

The Unfuddle Glossary

Unfuddle has,

• Projects: Top level Things which need to be done.
• User: People who are working on a given project.
• Ticket: What a User works on.
• Milestone: A timed list of tickets which should be completed before this given time ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Keeping url structure sane plays a major role in user experience, by making it easy to go to specific pages and navigate the site. Some real world urls and how they could have been better follow.

The Bad Urls:

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=99
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa336522.aspx

The Good

• Easy to develop for. The id referred is the Primary key

The Bad

• Hard for users to select the correct page from a url bar dropdown
• Bad for SEO

Neutral:

• Easy to guess next and previous ...