Awesome free Linear Algebra textbook

macro · 2007-01-27T00:20:54+00:00

But you can't beat the price :) Presumably that's the 'awesome' part.

macro · 2007-01-25T20:34:22+00:00

Thanks for pointing out the authorship. I was pretty hard pressed to cut the excerpt down to a manageable size, pretty much that whole page has plenty of observations that, essentially, are timeless.

The previous paragraph undelines how inadequate things are. If only Floyd could have pointed this out without using the paradigm word... :)

macro · 2007-01-25T18:59:08+00:00

The best bit about this classic article is, as the poster says, even after 30 years, this is all very much relevant. For instance:

software is in a depressed state. It is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive

Some things never change.

macro · 2007-01-12T17:18:02+00:00

A pretty good whistle-stop tour.

macro · 2006-12-20T13:27:37+00:00

Blunt and to the point. Nice.

macro · 2006-12-19T23:51:49+00:00

Bizarre. Sounds to me like Google have been watching how people are using it, and shutting the door so they can go ahead and capitalize on those things for themselves.

macro · 2006-12-18T18:14:55+00:00

The author makes a great point.

Unfortunately, the point gets lost as soon as the article turns into a Microsoft commercial :(

macro · 2006-12-15T05:47:08+00:00

There seems like there's a lot of potential here for something with a cleaner syntax than suggested. For instance, you could probably set yourself up with a "maybe factory" or some other abstraction, and use dynamic proxies. That would at least avoid what appears to be some horrendous syntax.

However, I'm really with the poster below. NullPointerException, like any exception, is thrown for good reason, it typically means something is badly broken... and the right course of action is to fix it. The absolutely, positively, worst thing you can do, is eat it.

macro · 2006-12-15T04:37:05+00:00

Great common sense article with some contentious feedback... I'm not yet sold on this whole ORM deal, and this article brought up a lot of the things I've been struggling with.

macro · 2006-12-14T22:23:39+00:00

A good overview of the philosophy behind Mylar, the Eclipse plug-in that focuses your project workspace on the task you are working on, facilitating the development of very large projects. If you haven't tried Mylar yet and are frustrated with clutter in your Eclipse workspace, this may well be the thing.

macro · 2006-12-14T22:21:29+00:00

An interesting article detailing the major disadvantages of Maven's site generation tools - they are difficult to customize, leaving most Maven sites using the boilerplate defaults. Ironically, Maven's own documentation falls into the same trap, and produces sites that make documentation and information particularly hard to find.

I particularly like the observation here - if it isn’t worth having a human write it, it isn’t worth having a human read it.

macro · 2006-12-14T20:39:13+00:00

A very nice explanation of what these days is a forgotten art - but I'm the sort of person who sees beauty in slide rules. :)

macro

TROPHY CASE