Shane Sherman

I have added a new top level category called Communications & Protocols that has the following child categories:

General Network Programming
HTTP
SOAP
TCP/IP
Wireless/Mobile Programming

I know there are a lot of other Protocols, but I think these are the main ones that probably have the most books written about them. If there are more that you think I should […]

I recently received an e-mail from someone who requested that I add a “Books for Young Programmers” category to ProgrammingBooks.org. I thought it was an awesome idea and created it. I then tried to think of some programming books catered for kids, and I couldn’t think of any. When I first started programming at age […]

The programmingbooks.org launch was a success. Thanks to everyone that participated and used the site! Since Friday afternoon it’s had roughly 50,000 page views. I got some great feedback and I am in the process of using the same engine for other kinds of things.

Even though I’ve been programming Ruby on Rails for over 2 […]

I got a lot of feedback from my previous article, The 5 Books that Every Programmer Should Read. As with all “top x” lists, many people disagreed with me, and had strong opinions about other books I didn’t list. This gave me the idea for:
ProgrammingBooks.org

Features include:

Ability to rank your own top 5 books you think […]

Over the years I have read many programming related books, and there are a few that really should be required reading for anyone who develops software. All of these books are language-neutral and cover ideas that pertain to any kind of programming. These are the cream of the crop. I would not trust a developer […]

ruby-ldap is a ruby module for communicating with LDAP, also know as ActiveDirectory for Windows. Unfortunately there is not a windows version of the module. I found a site that explained how to compile and get it working for windows, but it looks like the site is dead now, so I am going to go [...]

My first task at my new job was a simple enough one. All our customers have a review site that has a list of contacts. The file was contacts.html and it was just a static html file. The managers had to edit the html directly to add, update, or delete any contacts. Since editing HTML [...]

I've been doing web development since 1994 and Ruby on Rails is a breath of fresh air. In the past I have developed sites in Perl, Php, Asp.net, and Java. Ruby on Rails blows them all away in terms of ease of use and development time. I thought I would go through the specifics of [...]

I'm a huge Ruby on Rails fanboy, and I've been using it to write web applications for a year and a half now. I think it's superior to everything else I've used in the past 12 years. It does have problems though.
Migrations are not executed within a transaction
This one has bitten me on a number [...]

In my Keeping track of user-made changes post I descriped the various options for implementing change-tracking in my application. I ended up doing something completely different. Ruby on Rails has a cool feature called Observers which basically act like database triggers. After certain events(save, update, create, etc) happen your observer code will automatically get executed.
I [...]