Books & Tools Techniques

Comprehensive coverage of Ruby 1.8 and 1.9

"The New Most Important Ruby Book"
Peter Cooper,
rubyinside.com

Completely updated for Ajax and Web 2.0

"A must-have reference"
Brendan Eich,
creator of JavaScript

Jude

Jude is my Java documentation browser. It combines Sun's definitive javadocs with the easy-to-use format of Java in a Nutshell, and tops it off with easy keyboard-based navigation and full-text searching.

Jude is available for free evaluation.

See the user's guide for more info

Java in a Nutshell

The 5th edition is now out, with complete coverage of Java 5.0!

It includes a fast-paced tutorial on the language, and a compact quick-reference for the core Java API.

Java Examples in a Nutshell

The 3rd edition, updated for Java 1.4

This edition has all-new coverage of the NIO and JavaSound APIs, completely rewritten Servlets and XML chapters, and coverage of new Java 1.4 features (assertions, logging, preferences, SSL, etc.) added througout. A great book for those who like to learn by example. 193 working examples: 21,900 lines of carefully commented code to learn from.

Java 1.5 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook

Amazon incorrectly credits me as the main author on this book. I'm actually the second author: really more of a consultant. This is a good book about all the language changes in the latest version of Java.

Effective Java

I didn't write this excellent book, but I wish I had.

Author Josh Bloch is probably best known for the collections classes in the java.util package. His experience and wisdom are apparent in this book. I learned from it and recommend it highly.

May 16, 2007

Dashed lines in the <canvas> tag

The <canvas> tag supports all of the normal line attributes (width, join style, cap style, miter limit) except for dashes. Given that Apple's original implementation of <canvas> seemed a little bit rushed, I have always assumed that this was a simple oversight, and that it would soon be corrected in newer implementations.

I did, however, submit a comment about it to WHAT-WG. I was quite surprised to find out that they have no intention of supporting dashed lines. I've argued and argued with Ian Hickson about this, but he is unmoved. Supporting dashed lines would be non-trivial, he believes, and there haven't been enough requests for them.

So, this post is a public service announcement. If you were assuming, as I did, that dashed lines would be supported by the official specification of the <canvas> tag, you should be aware that they will not be. If, like me, you think that it is a mistake to define a graphics library that cannot natively draw dashed lines, then you can submit a comment to that effect to whatwg@whatwg.org.

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