Mr. Jeremy Flowers

Buyer be warned. Software only works for Windows., 29 Nov 2010

If you want to use the CD to test your skills, you'll be in for a rude awakening if you are a Mac or Unix user. It only works for Microsoft Operating Systems (unless you've got some sort of dual boot software like VMWare).
I filed this as an incident with publisher and they've made no allowance for it. This was the response I got...
Thank you for your inquiry to McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing Technical Support.
Hello Jeremy,

There is no Mac or UNIX compatible version of the CD available. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Not very helpful, you'd have thought there would be another distribution or an online version of this you can… Read more

Absolute dross, 20 Nov 2010

After reading the first 70 or so pages of this book, I gave up, because the author was talking absolute nonsense.
His example of chain function calling on P61 was laughable. It's a pity the author couldn't follow his own rules on specificity when defining CSS rules. News flash! The same applies when doing DOM manipulation. Why chain a lookup by id after a lookup by tag name. The id will be unique in the page!
Then we come on to his attempts to describe classes in JavaScript on P65. The author would have you believe code is creating a class, when what really was being described was a closure (function pointer). The new keyword was absolutely superfluous. The author makes no attempt… Read more

Sage advice on dealing with office politics., 19 Nov 2010

Reading through this book, Terrance classifies people into different groups.
For me this was a vivid portrayal, that I could instantly relate to having working with the full spectrum of such people.
He gives advice on how to handle these groups of people, and basically create allies, converting the masses to your cause, but in such a way as to not come across as blowing your own trumpet.
In essence this boils down to converting the low hanging fruit (colleagues) to your cause and gradually tackling the more challenging ones. Garnering such support you don't appear to be a lone crusader when presenting your case to management and if you heed the advice given on handling… Read more