Hi all,
I'm a first year library science student, also interested in programming.
As an assignment for a class I recently designed a pathfinder/subject guide
on computer science for librarians and library students. After watching
this thread for a couple of days, it dawned on me that, hey there might be
a demand for this kind of thing. So it give fairly incomplete coverage of
the subject so far, lets say broad but not deep, and it definitely exposes
my lack of web, or any, design experience. I did however give it a
libguides style menu bar (not technically tabbed). I didn't have time to
talk to our IT department which means that its just a small collection of
HTML/CSS files which is all my webspace will currently allow. My ambition
originally was to create a dynamic site using Library a la Carte or
something similar.
Which brings me to my original reason for posting: Is there, at present, a
publicly available subject guide for librarian coders that anyone knows of?
and would anyone be interested in collaborating on such a guide even if
just to give feedback. I mean obviously, there's code4lib, which is great,
but many people come to library school with no computer experience and then
find they have a real passion for programming. This would be a guide for
these people as well as librarians who find themselves suddenly needed
coding skills or an understanding of other CS or technology-related topics.
Has anyone else seen a need for this?
Thanks,
-Seth


On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Nate Vack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Alexander Johannesen
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > No argument there. For example, why are we having this conversation?  ;)
>
> Well, Anne was looking for advice on skills to pick up, when starting
> out a career as an application developer fresh out of library school.
> Hence, I was advising her that figuring peoples' needs (and the
> related communication skills, etc) is way more important than any
> particular technical skill. In particular, going out and picking up
> some random text on data modeling is not likely to be very useful.
>
> Technically, here's what I'd advise: rather than becoming an expert at
> any technology right now, try lots of stuff. The abundance and quality
> of free tools and guides right now is delightful. Build the tutorial
> apps for Rails and Django and Flask and Sinatra and Drupal. Make a
> simple Wordpress plugin and theme. Try Sphinx and Solr. Build
> something with a SQL database, and try rebuilding it with CouchDB or
> MongoDB. Play with jQuery and Prototype and MooTools. Compare CSS to
> SASS and Compass, and Blueprint to Susy. Try building a non-web-app --
> maybe iOS or Android. You can do all of this without spending a cent.
>
> As you do this, think about what you like and dislike about the things
> you're using, and how they compare. What do you like about PHP versus
> Ruby and Python? What do you like about Sinatra versus Rails, and
> Flask versus Django? How about ActiveRecord versus Django's database
> layer? What kind of problems are the CSS frameworks trying to solve,
> and do you like their solutions?
>
> A big part of what I've learned in sampling different tools is that
> there are solutions out there to problems I didn't even know were
> problems. I learned about typographic grids and vertical rhythm, for
> example, from Blueprint -- and discovered that they'd been used in
> print for hundreds of years, for very good reasons. ActiveRecord was
> the first ORM that really made sense to me -- and Rails was the thing
> that really illuminated MVC principles. After years of writing bad PHP
> code (I apologize again for Libstats), it was like a light turning on.
>
> Plan to fail on some projects -- but fail fast, fail cheap, and above
> all: learn from your failures.
>
> Best of luck!
> -Nate
>