Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Something is wrong between me and the design patterns book

About a year ago, I bought Head First Design Patterns, which is a really great book. I started reading it right away, and I was reading Head First Servlets and JSP together with it while I was on an assignment in Alexandria. Suddenly, something weird happened. I reached the chapter on the command design pattern, and then got back to Cairo to get stuck in crisis mode for two months, which didn't leave much reading time for me. I lent the book to a friend of mine, and kept the servlets & jsp book to read in my free time.

After the crisis mode I had a knee operation to regenerate my torn ACL, had a month sick leave, and went to visit my family in Abu Dhabi, but without the book. Went back to Cairo after that month to get an assignment in Dubai, and I got the book this time, only to leave it on the shelf until I study for the SCWCD certificate from the servlets & jsp book.

When I had time to read it, I ignored it for a while to read The Jesus Papers, which I loved by the way. Finally, I had a chance to start reading the design patterns book again. I revised what I had already read a very long time ago, and again reached the command pattern chapter, and guess what?! I had to travel between Dubai and Abu Dhabi twice a week, since my wife and kid were in Abu Dhabi with my parents, and I was in Dubai for work. Of course this didn't leave me any reading time. I went back to Cairo a couple of weeks ago for ten days, where I didn't even have time to sleep. I'm back in Dubai, and I have the book with me, and I hope that I would be able to start reading it again. Wish me luck.

Monday, December 3, 2007

Netbeans 6 is finally here

Finally, NetBeans 6 is released. It has some really great features like profiling and support for ruby. Also their Swing GUI builder (formerly known as Matisse) is really great, and it now supports Beans Binding and Swing Application Framework. The only thing I don't like about the use of the GUI builder is that it doesn't allow you to edit the code it generates yourself, which is really annoying for hardcore developers. Overall, NetBeans is really great, and it really excels in some great areas. For the full feature list, please check this link.