Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef

Did not read this book in details, basically going through the first 4 chapters and briefly glanced through the rest of the chapter. My primary objective is to compare Chef's features with Puppet's. Maybe because i learned Puppet first, i found that Puppet's syntax is easier to memorize, but the cookbook and recipe features of Chef is very useful for a sysadmin beginning his / her career, and mixing with Ruby code is also a welcome feature. Did not really read the TDD and BDD that book is trying to focus with Chef, maybe some other days when got more time can revisit this.

Link: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030973.do

Online Course: Introduction to 2D Game Programming with XNA

This course is very similar to the MonoGame course I read, albeit providing a bit more on how to manipulate in the game such as sprite sheet and animation as well as a more feature game (instead of the simple pong game in MonoGame course), but since sprite sheet concept and other stuffs taught in the course, i have already used these features and logics in my own MonoGame app before being taught there, there is really no much to learn in this course for me.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/xna

Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide

Very easy to follow book on Puppet, I managed to learns some key concepts of puppet such as package (install software package and versioning), service (manage services), file (check file exists and create files, etc), exec (running commands), user (create user and user access control and ssl), template (create template files in erb files for adaptive configuration), cron (scheduling), class, modules, nodes and import (puppet files structuring) and the very nice Facter tool from Puppet

Link: https://www.packtpub.com/networking-and-servers/puppet-3-beginner%E2%80%99s-guide

Online Course: Raspberry Pi for Developers

I was recently taking this online course to refresh my knowledge on Raspberry Pi and Python, the course is nice albeit focusing on the simple and basic stuff (actually this was what exactly i looked for in taking the course). While course is simple, it talks about how to GUI remote access the raspbian os running in the raspberry pi using tightvncserver (actually just linux standard GUI remote access), how to install wiringPi, how to work with RPi.GPIO to control the GPIO pins on the raspberry pi, and other nice tips such as audio playing using pyaudo and wave (needs to have external audio card with raspberry pi), how to set up nginx server and node.js (standard just like most set up on linux)

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/raspberry-pi-for-developers

Online Course: Cross Platform Game Development with MonoGame

Pick up this course because I need to quickly write a simple simulator of some animals doing crowd simulation using C# that will run in mobile, Unity 3D seems to be the option but its 2D features seems to have a steeper learning curve than MonoGame, therefore i picked the MonoGame (open source alternative to XNA that supports cross platform including mobiles). The course is quite simple, in fact the pong game used as demo in the course is next to nothing compared to the kind of games I built in the past, but it turns out to be quite a pleasure to learn MonoGame by watching the course.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/monogame

Online Course: Unit Testing In Java With JUnit

Just completes this course to upgrade my knowledge in JUnit, very nice and easy to follow, apart from learning about the advanced features in JUnit just as matchers, theory, suite, categories, rule, parameterized test, the course enriches me by providing information on how to using JUnit with Ant, maven, as well as code coverage tools such as ECLEmma (directly installed by eclipse) and Cobertura (when used with CI tool such as jenkins), Continuous testing tool such as infinitest, mockup tool such as jMock, (Not sure whether it is the google voice issue, though, the example given for google voice as dependency in unit testing seems to get into problem producing error message such as "https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/settings/tab/phones - Unauthorized") as well as Selenium for web test automation)

link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/java-unit-testing-junit

Online Course: Getting Started with Jenkins Continuous Integration

Just completed the online course "Getting Started with Jenkins Continuous Integration", it is very simple to follow and perfect for beginners who want to use Jenkins for CI. One thing though, user can ski the section 3 and jump to section 4 on plugins to learn how to set up MSBuild and MSTests plugin properly if they want to follow section 3 on hands-on, otherwise, might waste some time trying to figure out why builds failed even though the plugins have been installed.

Link: http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/jenkins-introduction