lilfluff

O'Reilly books has posted a note on a new book out from No Starch Press, Land of Lisp which aims to teach the Lisp programming language by guiding you through programming some games.

I have to say, that sounds like more fun than most programming books.

I've only made the lightest use of it, but I am officially declaring JUnit and unit testing in general to be nifty. It helped me make sure I didn't turn in a buggy homework assignment. I figured I had made the last necessary tweak to the program, but when I reran the tests it still came up saying 9 had passed and 1 had failed. At which point I looked at the pile of "if elses" and realized I had only checked to see if one of the two variables was below the acceptable range, leaving it still free to slip through above the acceptable range.

Pretty good for something I can mostly only use with a cookbook approach. "Ah, so I just copy that and change the class names to mine... oh and thats how I check that this matches that..."

In other words, yes I'm enjoying my Java class.

If you've spent any time wanting to play around with programming involving in SQL database, take a look at SQLite. A database engine so compact that the driver is the engine. Where MySQL's download is measured in megabytes, SQLite's is measured in kilobytes.

And despite that it's still quite useful. Decent SQL support, triggers, transactions, and other nifty stuff. It's included as a start feature in PHP 5.0, is supported in Perl, Python, C, Java, multiple DLL's to use it from Visual Basic, there's an ODBC driver to let any program that talks ODBC use it (again, the engine is embedded into the drivers) Ruby, and plenty of languages from Ada to Tcl/Tk.

Over the course of an hour I whipped together a set of perl programs that created a database, put a few entries in, and then viewed them. Which included time refreshing my limited perl skills.

Nifty.