DiP3 is a good book, if you are already familiar with Python. It's not for newbies. In fact, when I didn't know Python I disliked DiP3 to the point of making rude and ignorant comments about it on public forums. Now that I have a humble portion of Python, I like the book and refer to it often. Mark Pilgrim has an engaging style, too. I always appreciate a little style.
If you are looking for an intro book, go with Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way." There's another guy with lots of style.
I 2nd that emotion. If you are interested in Web apps, you might try creating with an old school CGI ecard site. It will introduce many basic concepts: working with the file system (images, thumbnails, etc), CGI, handling form data, doing simple database CRUD, and sending email. If you want to get fancy, you can build your own simple MVC framework in a few hundred lines.
I hear lots of smart people arguing that education can be improved by fired low performing teachers, breaking unions, enforcing discipline, raising test scores, etc. What I don't hear is lots of smart people saying, "Hey. I'm smart. I care about education. I think I'll become a teacher."
Not a single critic of education has come forward to say, I want to help by becoming a really great teacher.
The Happy Hacking Pro 2 is great if you like a compact 60 key keyboard. The Escape and Control keys are positioned perfectly for Vim and Emacs, so you don't have to bother with remapping them. Works on PCs and Macs. The price is steep but worth every penny. If I ever go to Japan I'll buy half a dozen and stockpile them. This keyboard is not for everyone, so you should try it before you buy.
I also use a Das Keyboard, a nice full-sized keyboard with a great build quality---but it is extremely noisy and I wouldn't recommend it for that reason only. There is a silent version, too. Knowing what I know now, I'd go for the quiet one. Funny thing, daskeyboard.com sells matching earplugs for this keyboard. You buy a set for yourself and for everyone who works in the same room as you.
Whenever we hear a prediction about "word of mouth" stunting the sales of an Apple product, we have to take that statement with an iPhone-sized grain of salt. Word of mouth doesn't hurt recent Apple products. The Gizmodo "leaks" were word of mouth about this particular phone and Apple sold 1,000,000 phones today.
If you will think back a few months, "word of mouth" was that the 27-inch iMac had screen problems. That "word of mouth" amounted to thousands of posts on the Apple support site. Apple simply fixed/replaced the machines with problems, improving their reputation as a make-good company. I haven't heard any "word of mouth" about the iMac lately because the customers are satisfied and the FUD has evaporated.
When these iPhone problems are resolved, this entire thread will dry up and blow away in the wind.
Mr. Olsen's essay is what we commonly call a rant. Though he doesn't fully reveal in his tirade why he perceives Jason Fried as a dangerous enemy who must be defeated, we can deduce the real reason for his seemingly bottomless anger: oxytocine poisoning.
Oxytocine is the love/hate hormone; it binds a cohort together and simultaneously creates aggression towards outsiders. Oxytocine is responsible for the condition known as The Fanboy Syndrome. Whether by design, or by instinct, each utterance from the lips of Jason Fried and Davie Heinemeier Hansson carries a payload of powerful semiotic messages that alter the target's brain chemistry. Sometimes the target will become a Fanboy, and sometimes the target will feel a threat to a pre-existing Fanboy alliance---then comes the rage.
As members of the tech community, we endure constant oxytocine bombardment by masters of manipulation. With each new version of Android, with every semi-annual dose Steve Jobs charisma, with every shift in the Facebook security policy, in the Ruby vs Python vs Java flame wars, we are exposed to massive, and sometimes fatal, doses of harmful hormones. It's important to remember that we are not animals; we can take defensive measures. When next you feel your Fanboy or your Hateboy urge rising from the depths, do not resist it. Resistance is futile. The path to freedom from oxytocine slavery is to acknowledge it, to embrace, and then, to let it go.
More power to 37Signals for having the good sense to set their own price and value for their own product. There's nothing controversial about asking $9.99 for a simple app that you can master in 5 minutes and use to sync your ideas with your team. Pricing Draft at $9.99 is no more controversial than charging $4.25 for a soy grean tea latte (a one-time use product, at that), $829 for a 64GB iPad, $2,200 for a 2-year Verizon Android contract, $51k for a Porsche Cayman, or $450 million to launch the Space Shuttle...
"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person's lawful prey." -- John Ruskin (found on a poster in my local Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop)
For someone who espouses grand principles (Rework), David is taking the low road with his petulant ad hominum attacks. Calling Ballmer's stage presence uncool is a little disingenuous when it's clear that Ballmer was just being himself and trying to get his lethargic team pumped up. Before casting too many more stones, David should reread his mentor Kathy Sierra's post about how unhappy people drag down the level of discourse.
News items that contain the word "killer" in the title are usually composed by uninformed local TV news writers, or by hack bloggers who want to drive easy fanboy traffic to their site with cheap rhetoric. We see the same motive in headlines that start with "Top Ten Reasons That...", and "Is My Karate Better Than Your Kung Fu?" or "Python is Dead!?". Sensationalism has its place---the tech gossip media is built on it---but it's disappointing to see it finding unquestioned acceptance on HN.
cashto's post was a "serious" effort to disperse the cloud of dogma surrounding unit testing and TDD. I hardly think that lashing back with "poppycock" is driving the conversation in the direction of "serious discussion".
cashto emphasized that unit testing is useful for teams with non-expert programmers (viz. his comment about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition). Many of us are non-experts who benefit from working with the TDD training wheels on; it's O.K. to be less a Jedi All-Star hacker. But the phenomenal programmers, the men and women who were 10 times better than me, could not be bothered with TDD, even through the endorsed it for mere mortals.
To paraphrase the TDD credo of “no test is worse than having no tests”, we can assert that blind faith is not better than no faith at all.
The last time I checked, no one had to pass an IQ test to use the Internet. Maybe it's time for Twitter (and other social media--you know who you are), to require potential users to pass a "minimal common sense" test. BTW, my remark is intended as humor and is in no way intended as a measure of my own common sense.
Every PHP programmer has lamented PHP's TMA (Too Many Ampersands) design, inconsistent method naming, function parameters order, etc. But PHP is the 800 pound gorilla with 15 years of momentum. It is what it is: a DSL written in C that's good enough at web development.
But you ain't gonna teach that old PHP dog new tricks without creating an entirely new language---in this case a DSL written in Java. When you get finished redesigning PHP, it's not PHP anymore. It's not even JPHP.
BTW, there are already languages that are free of sigils, semi-colons, and braces: Python and Ruby have been there for 15 years. If you need to do web development in those languages, they provide ample tools (Django, Rails, etc.) Both Python and Ruby have been ported to the JVM.
The lawyer is going to have to wrest that $5k from the mouths of those orphans in Kenya...you know, the orphans the alleged thief spends his spare time raising money for.
I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virtues often lost in the quest for novelty and elegance), and he conspicuously disdains excess. Check out his 2008 DrupalCon presentation and you will see that he is a straight shooter who does not curry favor or spare the ignorant.
As a teacher I can attest that it's impossible to find decent programming "text books" for Python, PHP, etc for classroom work. Most of the books you see on the bookshelves at Great Big Book Chain may be great books for programming language autodidacts, but they don't get adopted in courses because they universally lack relevant exercises for newbie students.
As a result, instructor's have to create all of the questions and exercises for the course---he/she might as well work without a book. At MIT, the Intro to Programming Course (using Python), doesn't have a textbook because, say the instructors, there are no good textbooks for Python. If Zed can come up with well-paced and instructive questions (Little Schemer-style), he's got a winner.
BTW, If you plan to contribute questions to Zed's book, try to put yourself into a newbie state of total ignorant bliss. Remember that the ideas you take for granted and think of as "simple" are completely daunting to beginners. Pacing is everything.
If you are looking for an intro book, go with Zed Shaw's "Learn Python the Hard Way." There's another guy with lots of style.