Unthinkingly

Power to the People: Free (as in Beer) O’Reilly Books and More

This is where it’s at folks: free programming and web design books. Make your computer do impossible feats of inhuman strength with this collection of languages and techniques, from old-school Fortran to Web 2.0 hipster-standards AJAX or Ruby.

I’m loving this collection and (hopefully by mid spring) I’m going to gather all of my favorite tutorials for use as a singe “Intro to web design” document. (Round of applause for the Creative Commons license, please.) So far I have been using Google’s wonderful new “Search by license type” feature on their advance search page, but this yields mostly just very specific tutorials. This page just turned me on to a whole lot of ther helpful resource, even if I can’t redistribute materials from the big publishers.

Most of the books here are just distributed online for free because they are older editions. They aren’t using an Open license, except in the case of the many online tutorials that are linked here (which are typically carefully chosen, I found).

This collection contains a lot of really great books (many from O’Reilly) that just happen to be a little out of date. I tend to get real excited when I find these things in the basement of my local thrift store, so this is real exciting. I’m noodling around this afternoon with a 2002 edition of “Mastering Regular Expressions,” which is the perfect book to find used becuase you don’t want to memorize all of it and it just doesn’t change very fast. In general I find that computer books are still really useful until about 6 years (or, for web design books, pre-IE6).

A couple of golden links for the basics:

The 2000 (O’Reilly) Definitive Guide to CSS (I use this one at home. Totally comprehensive, excellent in spite of the age, and written by the CSS demigod Eric Meyer. It never has been — and never will be — a great reference for browser support, which adds it’s timelessness.)

The Definitive Guide to HTML and XHTML (I use a hard copy of this one too. Great for looking up all those form and table tags you forget about. Written shortly after the standardization of XHTML 1.0, there’s no reason I can see to use a later version for now.)

Didn’t think I would find these for less than the $0.50 I paid for mine at the thrift store.

Web Developer’s Handbook: developing web-sites, exploring own imagination | CSS, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc.

The reason I love web design so much is that anyone can do it. The web is just full of tutorials, examples and geeks on call.

Here’s a massive resource of good links. It’s well organized and through, but it also manages to focus on reputable sources of information. Put this one in your bookmarks if you want to learn about putting your information on the web:

Web Developer’s Handbook: developing web-sites, exploring own imagination | CSS, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc.

Google’s Librarian Newsletter Offers New Explanation of Pagerank

Google has a new librarian’s newsletter that offers a nice clear (and brief) look at how their rankings work.

Nice to see a little bit of transparency from the behemoth Google, which is known to be more than a little secretive about its algorithms.

This doesn’t actually, clear things up entirely, but it is Google’s clearest, simplest explanation yet of how things work.

Being visible on the web is essential for anyone with good information to share. If you’re a nonprofit, activist, artist, or otherwise a force for good, you should know how to make your website prominent.

From the introduction:

One of the most common questions we hear from librarians is “How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?” Here, from quality engineer Matt Cutts, is a quick primer on how we crawl and index the web and then rank search results. Matt also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students.

Read the newsletter: Google Librarian Center

Digital Libraries for Education

The Digital Library for Earth Systems Education is a good example of the potential for using the web as a community repository of educational resources.

Unlike some of the other educational websites I’ve seen (which typically distribute prepackaged course materials), the DLESE has a strong emphasis on community input.

Having been around since 2001, it has a pretty extensive selection of resources, most of them related to the natural sciences (from the Mars rover to tsunamis).

I have seen some discussion recently about the value of this type of resource in reas like New Orleans, where entire libraries have been lost. It’s not difficult to extend this logic to the context of Liberia or Pakistan, though we have a little way to go before this type of resource is widely multilingual and accessible to teachers worldwide.

Have a visit: Digital Library for Earth System Education