Keyboard manufacturers would have you believe that ergonomic keyboards increase worker productivity, reduce injuries, and increase typing speed, but the real benefits are murky. The body of research on ergonomic keyboards is inconclusive, with a number of studies showing that ergonomic keyboards are of dubious value or that they decrease productivity. Read more »
The evolution from Make, to Ant, and then to Maven has done precious little to advance the state of Java build tools. Developers are still stuck with poorly thought-out tools that force us to violate DRY and write XML tag soup. Your team may be better served using a less popular alternative. Read more »
“Combinatorial Algorithms,” the 4th Volume of Knuth’s seminal work, The Art of Computer Programming, has been a long time in the making (Volume 3 was published in 1973), but it is now available for pre-order from Amazon. TAOCP is widely regarded as the most comprehensive book on its topic and is included in GrokCode’s list of essential books for programmers. Read more »
I’ve been in need of new workstation for a while, and finally plunked down the cash for it. I built a mid range workstation and installed the latest long term release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) 64 bit. The install was remarkably painless, and all of the hardware was auto-magically detected and works great in Ubuntu. Hardware support is much improved in the recent Ubuntu releases, but if you are looking for a rock solid build that just works with Ubuntu, give these specs a try. Read more »
Intimate knowledge of your code editor is required to be competent and productive developer. Here is a list of shortcuts anyone on the path to becoming an emacs guru should be familiar with. This shortcut reference card covers mostly intermediate and advanced shortcuts for GNU emacs (most of them will work with Xemacs as well.) I learned some great new shortcuts while making this cheat sheet; I hope they will be helpful to GrokCode’s readers as well. Read more »
This is a follow up to the list of recommended books for a hacker’s bookshelf that was posted a few months ago. Here are 5½ more essential books for a hacker’s bookshelf. This list is based on reader suggestions, and like the previous list of recommended programming books, it contains a nice mix of computer science texts, developer references, and books giving insight into the programming industry. This is another list of hackers’ classics. Read more »
Every hacker should have a good solid dead tree library to draw ideas from and use as reference material. This list has a bit of everything – textbooks you will encounter at top tier computer science universities, books giving insight into the industry, and references you shouldn’t be caught without. It is a list of hackers’ classics. Read more »
Every developer should have a collection of tools at their disposal to facilitate project planning stages, speed development, automate testing and building, organize code versions, and otherwise make life easier. Here is a list of the standard tools in my toolbox that make me more productive. Almost all of them are F/OSS and multi-platform. This list has a slight Java slant, but most of these tools are language independent. Read more »
