Stumbling Across the Web #4

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
37Signals’ book on web application development is now free to read online. No more $19 to download. It’s written without much fluff and with a lot of whitespace — a quick read.

Web-Sites of the Month: The Best of January 2007
The best web-development sites, articles, references and tutorials published in January. Lots of great stuff here.

Codefetch
A specialized search engine that searches only within code samples from programming books. May be a great way to find the right book to buy to tackle a specific problem, or if you’re lucky, to find the complete code solution without buying anything.

Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
The title says it all. My favorite error message in Windows 2000.

O’Reilly Open Books
About 30 full O’Reilly books were published with various “open” licenses, making them free to read and, in some cases, redistribute. They’re available here for reading online as PDFs. They’re not all incredibly recent books, but that doesn’t diminish the value at all. I would’ve liked to have the Mason and mod_perl books when I was rewriting old Mason programs in Java for a company two years ago.

Is it a pen? Is it a webcam? No… it’s a PC
A pen with a display projector, virtual keyboard projector and sensor, and a computer in between. A gadget I’d like to have in my pocket.

Programmers are brain surgeons
A blog entry discussing why programmers aren’t treated with the respect they deserve and what to do about it.