This post lists several benefits of taking a break during programming.You work smarter, not harder. Once, I worked really hard on a feature. For two weeks, 12 hours a day, I put in a lot of effort. After those two weeks, I took a break and came up with several ideas that made much of the work unnecessary.You think more clearly. Being tired has a similar effect as being drunk. At the end of a day, I often kid myself that I’ll just get this one thing finished quickly to have a fresh start the next day. In reality, I usually need to clean up yesterday’s messes then. If instead I fin...

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point.His summary is:Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generation teaches.Quality of posts, i.e. upvotes earned by post, only slightly increases with age.Seniors earn the...

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfortunately, it omits such influential languages as  Lisp,  ALGOL 60 and  Smalltalk. But inclu...

This post illustrates five interesting rich text editors ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some guidelines regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML code. Try them!1. Yahoo! UI Library: Rich Text EditorThe Yahoo! Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea and is based on Yahoo! UI Library; it allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images.Implement this editor in your web...

In JavaScript, showModalDialog()  method creates a simple modaldialog box which is a simple html page but when a modal dialog opens, user can't switch to another page until it closes the modal dialog box.Syntax:  window.showModalDialog( url, arguments, feature options); Where url is the URL of page which is to be opened in modal window and argumentsare those arguments which we are passing to the modal window and featureoptionsare the attributes set for the modal window.Description of code:Suppose we have an image file and we want to view that particular image fileinto a separat...

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs. There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candida...

O\'Reilly is celebrating the release of Java 7, and our inaugural OSCON Java conference: July 25-27 in Portland, Ore. Java\'s open source ecosystem is strong and healthy, one of the primary reasons for our creation of OSCON Java. Over the last decade, several projects have traveled beyond mere adoption and had effects dominating the Java world, into software development in general, and some even further into the daily lives of users. JUnitPorted to Java by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma from Beck\'s work in unit testing in Smalltalk, JUnit has been largely responsible for popularizing test-driven d...

Usually if you see on your website a white/blank space instead of Adsense ads, this means that Adsense cannot show adds in that unit for some reasons (we are going to talk about possible reasons below) and also you have enabled the “Fill space with a solid color” feature (in the “Choose what to display if no relevant ads are available” settings of this ad unit). I probably should also say that if you set “Show public service ads” instead of the “Fill space with a solid color” one, the PSA will be shown instead of a blank space.If you notice no us...