A rarely used CSS property that can be very useful given the right circumstances is the table-layout property. It has great rendering speed benefit when used properly. Obviously this will only apply to HTML <table>s, which I know none of you would EVER overuse. Tables are not totally evil, they have their proper implementations and their really, really bad ones. OK, on to the code:
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This last Friday I took the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam (Java 5 edition). I am going to talk about the experience, what I would have done differently and why it will end up mattering.

So just how hard is the SCJP? Instead of phrasing it in some vague way, I’m going to tell you what I did and how it all worked out for me. For starters, I studied for about 25 hours over the course of 10 days before my exam. I would say that having 18 months of Java experience did not help much. I also took 2 practice tests but they weren’t as helpful as I would’ve liked. However, I do still highly recommend reading the SCJP Study Guide by Sierra and Bates. It was fairly thorough and contained many helpful tips. Continue reading →

1. Don’t create prototypes

Clients do not know what they want. Managers do not know what they want. When you prototype, you learn about the constraints you are going to face and your audience learns what they can have and what is impossible. NOTE: Try not to use your prototypes for production code, they are meant to be prototypes. Learn from them and don’t just….

2. Copy the code

When you copy code one of these scenarios is likely to occur: either you don’t fully understand what it does or you may know but don’t think about refactoring it to be better because you expect it to just work. I know many of you out there see this all day long: someone copies code because they are lazy and don’t correctly create an abstraction, and they end up violating the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. Now when rules change, you have multiple pieces of code to change. Unfortunately, it seems that people who copy code also tend to believe that they should…
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