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Filed under: Web development

Review of Head First jQuery By Ryan Benedetti, Ronan Cranley

Another from the head-first series, this book presents in a more graphical-than-normal explanation of JQuery, from novice-to-intermediate, filled with a lot of examples. Many people would tend to enjoy reading books this way, and I can appreciate that for some this is the best way to learn a new language, but going on from previous titles such as Head First Java, I still haven't enjoyed the structure as much. If you haven't done any programming before, then perhaps this book would suite you well, but for those of us who are picking this up to brush up on web-based languages, coming from other languages, this book can be a bit frustrating.

I appreciate the neatness of the author compacting in a zip file all the example code/files, but for me, the cookbook series would be more useful. Having said that, one could probably get both books and start off with some easy examples to grasp the basics of how JQuery works, before looking at specific examples by reference (with the cookbook series). All in all, I'd give it about 3 thumbs up, but appreciate the relevance to the more novice dudes out there.

Head First jQuery

By Ryan Benedetti, Ronan Cranley
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Released: September 2011
Pages: 544

Sharify: Shareware-ize your Air/Flex Apps

With Sharify, you can earn money from your Adobe Air/Flex apps, by monetizing them through a shareware, and set licensing fees according to your business propositions. Pretty cool...

By simply integrating their swc library into your application, then calling a method to listen for an event and handling it, you can choose your own payment methods and only pay 3% of each of your license-issuing to Sharify and keep the rest. It's a lot better than what you may get at Apple, and with the Android platform also looking to include Air capabilities, you look set to sell cross-platform and gain maximum exposure.

With Sharify, you also have a neat control panel that will allow you to manage your licenses, transfer licenses (if a user for example changes computers), issue free and beta testing licenses, view stats on users, how many are on trial, how many have upgraded and so forth. They are currently in alpha testing, and are allowing users to test via invite only, but I dare say watch this space, as I can see some really neat things coming out of it.

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Top Flash Misperceptions : Flash is a CPU Hog at Mike Chambers

Top Flash Misperceptions : Flash is a CPU Hog

This is one of the most prevalent misperceptions associated with Flash. Basically, the myth is that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU compared to other, similar technologies.

Before looking in more detail at this misperception, I think it is important to point out that when one makes the statement “Flash is a CPU hog”, they are making a comparison of Flash CPU usage to some baseline. This then begs the question: Flash uses a lot of CPU compared to what? By comparing Flash CPU usage to other similar technologies and content, it becomes clear that Flash CPU usage is not excessive for the type of content that it displays and executes.
 
If the comparison is between Flash based dynamic, multi-media content and static HTML documents, then, of course, Flash content is going to use more CPU. It is doing a lot more stuff, potentially including loading data, playing audio and / or video, drawing and animating content, responding to user input, and so on. The nature of multimedia content is that it is doing more, and thus requires more CPU resources. Thus, if the comparison is against static web documents, then yes, Flash does use more CPU, although a more apt statement would be “Multimedia content uses more CPU”. However, this only answers the question whether Flash uses more CPU than static HTML documents, and does not address the misperception that Flash uses an inordinate amount of CPU for what it does.

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