Illustrated C# 2008

If you’re a C++ or VB programmer migrating to C# 2008, this book is well worth reading. The author, Daniel Solis offers a very visual approach – with lots of figures, diagrams and code samples – that will help you get to work with C# fast.

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One of my flatmate bought this interesting book about Psychometric Test. It consists of succinct explanations and concepts, with more emphasis on training your skill. So if the job that you’re applying requires you to have Psychometric Test, make sure you get yourself prepared by not missing out this book.

The book covers 5 interesting subjects.

• Firstly, the book will introduce you to what a psychometric test is all about and how to prepare yourself against such test. It also will give you tips on how to improve your performance during the test.
• Secondly, it covers about Numerical Reasoning Tests. Numerical Reasoning Tests assess your ability to reason with numerical information. The book explains many types of question that you might face in this type of test. Then it will give you a plenty of practice questions for you to jog your memory.
• Thirdly, the book explains about Verbal Reasoning Tests. Topics such as spelling, word comprehension, word analogies and text comprehension are all well covered here. The book also kind enough by pointing other free resources in Internet, should you need more practice questions
• Fourthly, it covers the Abstract Reasoning Tests. This is my favorite subject. Why? Because this test assess your ability to identify patterns within diagrams, and I love searching for patterns . The practice questions is very similar to those that you find in your IQ Test.
• Lastly, it discussed about Personality Questionnaire. I learned a lot from this chapter. It taught things like there is no wrong or right answer in a personality test, marking up your scores might punishes you by landing you a job that is not suitable. In short, you should be honest with your personality test. Also, making yourself ‘too good’, also might not necessarily land you the job. Because certain type of job requires certain type of personality.

In the last chapter of the book, there is a Personality Questionnaires. I have make available here. You can calculate your personality score here. Btw, you need to enable Javascript to make the question appear (I generate them using Javascript). To calculate your score, just click the button after the final questionnaire.

Free Psychometric Test

Now that you know your personality scores, you need to interpret them. You could find the interpretation of these scores in the last chapter of this BOOK (Please don’t be angry .. I just want to practice my Javascript-fu. Not intending to receive a cease & desist order)

Today I read this book as I was waiting for my project compiling. This book has been laying on my desk since last Friday. It used to be in laying on one of my colleague desk (untouched! hehehe …. ). Anyway, she left my company last Friday, so she passed the book to me (Okay, I did volunteered to provide the book a space in my table ). I did first hesitant to receive the book as I am more fond to MSDN Class Library You know, just browsing here and there when you stuck at a particular problem.

So while my computer bogged down by the compilation process, I gave the book a peek. I skimmed through the pages looking for things that might attract my attention. Unsurprisingly (well.. I did surprised ), I realized that I haven’t really dig down all the knowledge (read: language features) about Visual Basic 2005. Here are the things that I learned today:

1. AndAlso, OrElse keywords. These keywords will help you to short circuit the logic statement. Consider “foo1() AndAlso foo2()”. So if foo1() already returned false, the foo2() statement will not be evaluated. Thus, you increase the execution speed by the complexity of foo2(). And if you use OrElse, foo2() will not be evaluated if foo1() is true. Of course you cannot short circuit the logic statement if your foo2() is doing some kind of processing that you will need to use the result later on.
2. <Obsolete(”This_Is_Your_Warning_String”)> method attribute. This method attribute helps you generate the compilation warning. So if your colleagues are using your obsolete method, they will see the warning in the compilation log or Visual Studio (Yes my friends, please look at all those warning signs before that Runtime Exception bites your honor in the production server)
3. My namespace. There are quite many of them. You could check them out HERE. Before today, I don’t know that to download from Internet and save the content to a file can be done just by using this single line of code

   My.Computer.Network.DownloadFile _
       ("http://www.cohowinery.com/downloads/WineList.txt", _
       "C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersDocumentsWineList.txt")
   

   without all the complexity of dealing with Stream Object.

4. And many more … (my brain short term memory capacity is limited to only three interesting things )

After this shocking proof of ignorance wake up call, I think I have been slowing down in my learning process. I am still far away from reaching the top. I am motivated to do better, so should you Have a nice reading!

PS:The book is good if you’re just started programming in Visual Basic.NET (or thought that you know enough about VB.NET, but apparently you’re not ). The flow is structured in such a way that it’s easy for you to either taking a close detailed look, or just skimming through the pages.

I am impressed with the vast availability of information that available here. I recommend this site for those who are hunger with Information.

I wonder when my univ follow the steps to provide the lecture notes/tutorials/assignments to everyone. But would that defeat the purpose of people paying such a huge amount of money to pursue their degree? *grin*

One thing that always accompany me is my PDA. It’s an Ipaq RX3715 PDA. It has been accompanied me for 1 year plus. I bought the PDA from other person for $350 through HardwareZone.com. So far it has served me well. Hopefully it will continue to do so.

One of the recent activities that I take interest on is reading classic literatures. I found out that this habit is the best way to kill time when I commute using MRT from my home to my workplace in the morning. At least this way I can keep the reading habit alive and make the commuting time efficient. It also prevent me from wasting the time when I queueing for something. So yes, it is a life-saver .

I used to read those e-books in Microsoft Reader Format (I’ve read those classics such as Captain Blood, The Call of the Wild, Treasure Island, A Study in Scarlet, Great Expectations, The Prince, The Secret Garden in this format). When I recently rediscover the Project Gutenberg, I was really excited with the number of e-book collections available for download.

The best way to read the e-books from project Gutenberg is to install Vade-Mecum, a plucker document reader for Pocket PC.

So far I have downloaded all Mark Twain’s books. And currently immersed with Tom Sawyer’s adventures.

In short:

1. Download Microsoft Reader for Pocket PC
2. Download Vade-Mecum, Plucker reader for Pocket PC
3. Download the Free E-Books in Microsoft Reader Format
4. Download the free E-Books in the Plucker Format

Have fun reading!

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On other platform I have been meddling with Linux, having fun with Bash scripts, playing around with Perl. But unfortunately I did not even use TCL/TK at all.

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When I was wowed by Rails, there’s a small part of me that wants to learn Ruby. So I googled around, lo and behold … I found the Best Guidebook In The World.

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Quick … run ….

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Ruby .. here I come …

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hey wait … you have not tell us how to learn a new programming language ….!!!

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oh right .. well basically to start you need to find something similar to the Best Guidebook In The World, download the necessary tookit, practice everyday, create something useful for yourself and the community, and keep believing that you read this posting because of your destiny =).

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Oh man … I regret above paragraph, I mean … unrelated Title and Content should classify as a Prank right?